


we can haunt each other's dreams

by Flowerparrish



Series: broken bridges // cruel world [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (Temporary) Murder, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams and Nightmares, Drowning, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Found Family, Insanity, Later in the series, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, POV Third Person, Post-Canon, Revenge, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:35:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28471749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish
Summary: She is used to the first breath of air hitting her lungs. Her body regenerates; it creates air just to allow her to drown once more, over and over ad infinitum.Surprise comes when a second breath of air hits her lungs, an equally desperate gasp. It causes her to cough out all of the water that remains in her lungs in between revivals, the liquid hot with bile and her own body’s heat as it scalds the back of her throat on its way out.The pain doesn’t matter.The second breath of air, followed quickly by a third and fourth and fifth, brings with it the dizzying realization that she is free.Quynh opens her eyes to a new world and has no thoughts, the whole of her being full instead with two warring emotions: hope, and a desperate need for vengeance.ORQuynh wakes up.&everything that happens after
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: broken bridges // cruel world [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085456
Comments: 89
Kudos: 123





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kh530](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kh530/gifts).



> For Sam, who said: "There won't be a sequel soon enough. You should write one." To which I said, "lol, no." and then.... this. 
> 
> This is the FIRST installment of a series. This fic is complete and will post twice a week, Friday & Tuesday. The sequel is in the works and will begin posting when I am confident it is almost complete. 
> 
> Thank you to Sam for primary beta work and Katey for catching any last errors. Anything beyond that is my bad.
> 
> Last thing, I think most of the foreign words I use are easy to translate, but I am coding in hover-text translations if you're on a laptop. If not, I'll put translations at the end of each chapter.

_She said "are you okay?"_

_And I'm staring into space_

_It's making her nervous 'cause one thing is certain_

_I don't have my head on straight_

(Hold It Together - Mike Shinoda)

* * *

The first gasp of sweet air into her lungs does not bring with it any new emotion. All of the things she feels are familiar to her: relief first and foremost, mingled with frustration, dread, and a white-hot, furious rage.

She is used to the first breath of air hitting her lungs. Her body regenerates; it creates air just to allow her to drown once more, over and over ad infinitum.

Surprise comes when a _second_ breath of air hits her lungs, an equally desperate gasp. It causes her to cough out all of the water that remains in her lungs in between revivals, the liquid hot with bile and her own body’s heat as it scalds the back of her throat on its way out.

The pain doesn’t matter.

The second breath of air, followed quickly by a third and fourth and fifth, brings with it the dizzying realization that she is _free._

Quynh opens her eyes to a new world and has no thoughts, the whole of her being full instead with two warring emotions: hope, and a desperate need for _vengeance._

* * *

Quynh washes up on shore in a remote region of modern-day Brittany. She lingers on the rocky shore not because she wishes to, but instead because her body has yet to remember how to move. 

She’s in perfect condition now that the last of the water has been expelled from her lungs; the lacerations on her skin from fighting free of her rusted cage had long healed over before she even made it to shore. Her accelerated healing means that she has no muscles atrophied from disuse; and yet, she cannot bring herself to _move_ for minutes, for hours; a hundred breaths pass, then a thousand.

It is only when she hears a scream that she realizes her eyes have fallen shut once more. She feels something close to peace, basking in the caress of warmth from the sun that she’d feared was out of her grasp for eternity. 

Her eyes open, just slits at first, narrow against what she expects to be a blinding brightness. Instead, she sees a sky split wide with pink and purple hues as the sun slips below the horizon once more. _Farewell for now,_ she thinks, because she does not need to worry that she will never see it again. Her days are endless; if she has not died yet, she never will. The sun will rise tomorrow and she will be there to see it again.

The screaming cuts off when her eyes open, fading into gasping breaths as a woman rushes toward her over the rocks. “ _ Je pensais que tu étais mort! _” she babbles in hysterical, rapid-fire French. The sound of the language, never any particular favorite of Quynh’s, makes her nostalgic in an as of yet unquantifiable way.

Later. Soon there will be time to sort out memories and dreams, but not yet.

For now, she smiles up at this human whom she could kill so easily with nothing but her bare hands. “Where are we?” she asks, first in English because it is easier. Her mind supplies her with the words in French a moment later, though, and she repeats, “ _ Oú sommes-nous? _ _”_

“The coast in the north of France. What happened to you?” The woman joins her in speaking English, which is a relief to Quynh’s overtaxed mind. It is not her first nor favorite language, but it was the last one she spoke aloud, and it comes quickest to her lips now.

Quynh obviously cannot explain, does not know enough about this world that she’s woken up to after an endless nightmare to come up with any kind of lie. Instead, she shrugs, hissing in genuine but exaggerated pain as her shoulders scrape against sharp rocks. The rocks do not break skin, but they dig in unpleasantly. It almost doesn’t register, but Quynh knows how to evoke pity through suffering—her reaction does the trick, making the woman nod and reach out a hand to help Quynh to her feet.

When Quynh is standing, rocks digging into her bare feet in a way that reminds her she is _free,_ she can _feel_ something other than the endless panic and desperation even if it is inconsequential pain against the soles of her feet—when her would-be rescuer shrugs out of a coat and offers it to Quynh. “Here,” she offers, “my home is nearby. Come, let’s get you warmed up.”

It is cold, Quynh realizes. Small bumps cover her exposed skin in response to the chill, but it is nothing she is not long accustomed to at this point.

Still, she accepts the kindness because it will help her get to where she needs to be. “Thank you,” she replies sweetly. “What is your name?”

“Dominique,” the woman offers. Her dark skin causes the same echo in Quynh’s head, a memory but also not, the same strange nostalgia Quynh felt when hearing her speak French.

“Quynh,” she offers in return. She bundles herself into the coat. It is warmer than any garment she is used to wearing, falling down to her mid-thighs when pulled close around her thin body.

It is the first comfort she can remember in so long that it might as well be forever.

Quynh resolves not to kill this woman if she can help it. The rage simmers beneath Quynh’s skin, lurking and ever poised to strike. But this is not her target, and Quynh doesn’t want to waste a drop of vengeance on collateral damage, not unless it is on the little brothers who also forsook her. 

_Andromache,_ she thinks, and wonders if somewhere, somehow, the woman who was once her lover feels the invocation, the threat, the _promise:_

_I am coming for you._

* * *

Memories organize themselves slowly now that she has the time and space to sort through them. The water was an unending torment, but there were flashes in between deaths that called to her.

The man, she knows now that she has had the time to process these memories, is the reason this language falls softly on her ears. She feels his pain, an afterthought to her own, as much a relief in its difference as the dulled edge of his thoughts which are often heavy with drink. _Booker._

He is alone. She has few glimpses into this new loneliness; upon reflection, she concludes that the haze of drink is less likely a factor in their scarcity than a limited passage of time.

He is alone, and she sees the streets he haunts, the building where he lives on the ground floor, a lock that she can easily undo. The front of a building that she may not know from experience but will recognize by sight, and she has nothing if not time to search for it.

She slips away from the small beach home where she’s been piecing back together memories—if not _herself,_ a much more improbable endeavor _._

Before she left, she stole a map. She also took soft pants and thick boots and the bright red coat she has come to cherish. She does not need much by way of food or drink, but she searches out some money as well. She only steals half of what she discovers; she has no idea how much anything costs now, but the numbers on the silly printed paper seem improbably high, so half should be more than enough.

She begins to walk in the direction of Paris. Turns out she didn’t even need a map; signposts point the way, counting down the miles for her and everything. She walks next to the road, grateful for the children’s memories because she is not startled by the first automobile that passes her by on the roadway. She sleeps hidden by bushes and trees, breathes in the scent of the earth beneath her cheek, and _cherishes_ every moment of blissful rest.

Two days into her walk to Paris she discovers a town with a _train,_ an invention that is an echo of an idea in a memory from one of the children, and she takes that the rest of the way to the city.

There, she begins to wander.

It does not take long; she finds the least savory regions she can, and within short days of searching she finds the building where Booker lives (located, of course, near a store that sells alcohol).

_Sweet child,_ she thinks, almost fond. That is, if fondness could be considered a weapon, deadly and sharp. 

She easily breaks into the ground-floor apartment and pours herself a drink—water, rather than the liquor her newest brother favors, because she will not show weakness to anyone, least of all herself—while she leans against the counter and waits.

It does not take long.

She is pouring another glass of water when she hears glass shatter outside, followed by a voice cursing in slurred French. The sound is more familiar than any of her own memories from _before,_ and she would form a genuine smile if she was capable. This moment, if anything, proves that she is not.

She loses time for a moment—it happens, but she cannot bother to be concerned because that will not change her reality—and blinks back to the present in time to stare at the gun pointed in her direction.

Guns. Adapted from the region south of her birth, from a people she once had more in common with than this man in front of her.

“Booker,” she says, tasting his name on her tongue for the first time. It tastes like the way drinking whiskey feels; there is the memory of a burn in her throat as she swallows. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

* * *

Nile wakes up with a gasp, but it isn’t followed by heaving breaths the way they’ve all become accustomed to.

Nile doesn’t know how to make sense of what she saw. She sits up, and Andy rolls over from where she’s been curled in a graceful S shape facing the wall. “Nile?” Her voice is as sharp as it always is, but her eyes betray a hint of softness that Nile gets more glimpses of as each day passes. They shine dark in the moonlight that pours through the window, and Nile swallows thickly.

She _can’t_ say anything right now, not when she doesn’t have any clue what the change in her dreams might mean.

“Go back to sleep,” she manages, and Andy stares at her for a few long moments before she dips her chin in a fraction of a nod. Andy rolls over and her breathing eases into sleep almost immediately, exhibiting an experienced soldier’s near-effortless ability to steal sleep whenever they can steal a moment of peace.

Nile rolls out of bed and makes her way out of the room, heading for the kitchen and the electric kettle. It’s an upgrade she talked them all into, because she makes tea every time she has a nightmare. This way the whistle of boiling water in the teapot might not wake everyone from whatever sleep they manage to find. 

It turns out it was a pointless consideration. Just her movement in the kitchen, the quiet opening of cupboards and the susurration of the boiling water in the kettle, never fails to wake them anyway. Joe tried to tell her that they were light sleepers; now, after months of living side-by-side, she understands what he meant. 

So she is unsurprised when she senses a presence behind her even though she doesn’t hear the noise of his approach.

Nicky appears in her peripheral vision as he steps up next to her a moment later, flicking the electric kettle off as it begins to boil in earnest. He studies Nile’s face and nods to himself, digging through the cupboard for whatever tea he’s decided she needs.

Joe always leaves her to her own devices on that front; he says she knows what she needs better than he could ever hope to. He shows his care in a quiet presence and the offer of companionship.

Nicky is the opposite. He shows his love by making this miserable routine into a pleasant surprise, by going out to find new varieties of tea to give her on nights like these. He makes the nights he sacrifices his sleep to keep her company into something special between the two of them, and she loves him for it in return.

She leans to the side for a moment, briefly bumping her shoulder against his. He glances at her, a crooked smile on his lips that makes his blue eyes sparkle, before he digs through the cupboard once more.

He lets out a quiet, “aha!” of success when he finds whatever he’s been looking for, emerging with just a tea bag and no hint as to what it could contain.

She smiles. He’s ridiculous, this man she knows she will one day love as dearly as she loves her own brother. That thought makes her sad, but no sadder than she already was, and her lingering confusion is a more pressing matter than the constant toothache of sadness anyway.

He pours the boiling water into the mug, stirs in three spoonfuls of sugar, and drops the tea bag into the water to swirl aimlessly. She watches it as he turns to watch her, blue eyes searching. “What is it?” he asks, and she would be curious how he knows that this time, something is different. But if she’s learned anything by now, it’s that Nicky is frighteningly perceptive.

She sighs. “I don’t know.”

He hums, not pressing for more but offering to listen if she wants to parse it out.

“I saw… a train. Flashes of countryside from the window, speeding by. It was… green. And it felt like…” Words fail her. She shrugs, helpless.

Nicky finishes the thought for her, knowing, intuitively, what words might fill the gaps of her speech if only she could dare to voice them. “It felt like Quynh?”

She sighs again. “I don’t know. Yes. But… I’ve felt so much from her by now, I could easily be dreaming things up. Magic doesn’t have a monopoly on nightmares.”

He hums again, this time a noncommittal sound.

That worries her; if he thinks this is serious, then… well, he knows more than she does, after all. “Do I tell Andy?”

He plucks the teabag from the tea and pushes the mug over to her. She cradles it in both hands, not minding the scalding heat against her palms because it grounds her and soothes the frantic rhythm of her heart. 

“I would say… not yet.” She glances up, wanting to meet his gaze, but his eyes are far away as he stares past her instead of into her soul. “Not until you are sure.”

“Okay,” she agrees. She doesn’t like to keep secrets, but the last thing she wants to do is give Andy false hope. Especially when, even if she is right about Quynh, that hope is unfounded. The woman Nile sees in her dreams is angry and insane. There will be no happy reunions there, and Nile is smart enough to admit she’s a little bit terrified of Quynh.

She takes a sip of the tea and makes a shocked, delighted noise. Warm with more than heat; spices, some chai blend he must’ve found recently because it doesn’t taste like any of the ones she’s tried that were already in the cupboards. 

Nicky’s eyes focus on her once more, the crooked smile back on his face, expression warmer than the drink in her hands and the spices on her tongue. “Would you like to watch a movie?” he asks.

She would. So, they do.

She falls asleep tucked under Nicky’s arm, drooling onto his shirt. The feeling that lulls her into unconsciousness is one that is becoming more and more familiar as the weeks pass them by: belonging. Family.

Home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: temporary character death, canon-typical violence, alcohol abuse

_ I never meant to start a fire _

_ I never meant to make you bleed _

_ I'll be a better man today _

(I’ll Be Good - Jaymes Young)

Booker’s mind spins with the impossibility of this. 

He knows,  _ of course _ he knows, who this is. 

How could he not? He’s been inside her mind more often than anyone else’s; he’s heard stories of her for years. From Andy, but only when she’s blackout drunk. From Nicky, disconsolate after Booker woke up from nightmares that got less and less frequent as time went by. 

(Or so he’d pretended, when really all that had happened was that he got used to sleeping through them, his mind becoming accustomed to the torture of drowning over and over until even the air in his lungs felt like its own kind of torment.) 

He’s even heard stories from Joe, the two of them awake late at night, the last ones clinging to consciousness and trying desperately to chase any distraction. Always, always after a close call of some kind--after moments when Nicky had been blown up, torn apart, snatched away from them for moments that, to Joe, must have felt like eons in his blinding terror and helpless dread. 

He speaks of his lost sister, who could dance and curse and fight with a beauty and grace that has never been known before and will never be known again. A woman who could be fiercer than Andy and quicker than all of them combined in both mind and body, a woman with a ferocity that was quiet enough that it always surprised those who didn’t know her well enough to fear her at first sight. 

She was the kind of woman who could collapse an empire on her own but had never needed to, because it had been Quynh-and-Andy, Andy-and-Quynh, all the way back. 

Booker is aware that the pain he feels every moment he continues to draw in air is nothing like Quynh’s pain, drowning and insane, angry and scared. He’s aware that it’s nothing compared to Andy’s, losing the other half of her soul, a woman she spent millennia loving. 

He’s even aware that his loss is nothing compared to Joe and Nicky’s loss of a sister who had been there for them from almost the start. He can scarcely imagine what it must have taken from them to push aside their own grief in order to hold their other sister together and help rebuild what they could of her will to live. 

He cannot understand the grief of searching and being unable to find Quynh, whom they all loved dearly in their own ways. He will never match the grief that Quynh feels every time she gasps back to life only for water to fill her lungs again and has just enough of a tether to reality left to know she has been abandoned. 

Booker’s grief, in the grand scheme of things, is small. It is incomparable to what his family has suffered. 

It was still too much for him to carry, and he convinced himself that given their grief, he was making the choice that they were all too noble to make themselves. 

He was weak, and he was wrong, and he will regret that every day. 

But Quynh is here, in  _ front  _ of him, alive and whole and miraculously free. And he thinks that maybe, just maybe, if he could bring her back to them--maybe that would be redemption. 

The first step, if nothing else, toward fixing what he’d irreparably broken between them all. 

And even if it doesn’t, if he can give Andy back nothing but her very heart before she is taken from this world at long last? 

Then he can do nothing else. He owes her nothing less. 

He has spent over two hundred years being a coward. 

He will not fail them again. 

  
  


* * *

It’s going to be harder than he thought to do that, though. 

That’s his first thought, as Quynh begins to talk. She sounds calm, controlled, and underneath that is nothing shy of carefully concealed fury. She believes she is righteous in her quest for vengeance, and she will stop at nothing in order to exact retribution for the harm she has been dealt. 

Booker could argue with her. She’d kill him, and then she’d leave before he came back to life. But… they’ve met now. He wouldn’t be able to dream of her, and he’d be  _ useless.  _

He doesn’t even know if his family would trust his story. Until Nile dreamed it herself, would they even believe a word he said? 

No. 

They wouldn’t. 

And he could never blame them for that. 

“I’ll get us a location,” he promises Quynh, and it comes out like the truth because it is. 

He will take her home, no matter how many times he dies to do it. That said, he’s hoping a little bit of a chase will burn some of the fire out of her veins first. 

He gets a laptop and a burner phone with cash he’s made on jobs that are suicide for a single person but child’s play for Booker. Jobs where he does what good he can in the world in order to try to earn forgiveness for his sins. If he was a better man, he’d do them because it was the right thing to do. But Nicky is the idealist; Booker is pragmatic to his core and unconcerned, largely, with morality. 

Even he feels nothing but a burning desire to kill some of the people he accepts hits on; some of the atrocities he sees committed make him wonder what the fuck humanity is even doing, how these people could possibly be allowed to exist. 

The point is that he has money--plenty of it, even refusing to touch any accounts he has that are linked to others in the team. So he buys what he needs and sets up tracing equipment, searches for tracks of his family that are so minimal even Copley wouldn’t know to erase them--an alias he knows Joe favors used in Budapest, linked to a credit card, linked to a purchase of a burner phone, and it’s  _ something.  _

He looks up and hours have passed. Quynh is asleep on the bed across the room. It’s a terrible mattress, a lumpy thing with springs that poke into his back and leave him sore, but Quynh seems utterly unbothered. 

She sleeps soundly and looks almost sweet like this. Her visage is so much younger than he would have expected. It’s deceptive when she’s not awake to stare at him with eyes that reflect unspeakable horrors in their depths: the horrors of what she’s seen, of what she’s been through, and of what she wishes to do now. 

He picks up his own burner phone, dials a number, and presses call. 

He does not breathe for the seconds it takes for the line to connect. “Hello?” he hears, and he could cry. 

How could he ever have thought--

It’s not important. It’s not. 

He chokes on a breath that comes out something like a sob. 

“How did you get this number?” Joe demands, and there’s suspicion in his tone. Does he know it’s Booker? Could he? 

Either way, Booker can’t respond. He simply breathes on the other end of the line, allows the tracing software to do its work, and then drops the phone and crushes it under his boot. 

Fuck. 

There’s tears in his eyes that sting while Quynh continues to sleep like the dead, lucky her. So Booker allows them to spill down his cheeks and into his beard, hot and leaving wet tracks on his cheeks. 

_ I miss you,  _ he thinks, and,  _ I’m sorry.  _

_ I’m trying,  _ he promises. 

He cries until he has no tears left, and then he drinks until he can’t think straight, and when he falls asleep next to Quynh on the too-small bed, he kind of hopes she wakes up and shoves a knife between his ribs. 

She doesn’t; she wakes up and shoves him off the bed instead. He hits the floor with an  _ oof  _ of exhaled air as his chest tightens on impact. She peers over the edge of the bed at him, oddly child-like in this moment, confused and curious. 

It passes; she settles back into the mostly blank stare she favors. “Location?”

“Argentina,” he tells her, the words slurred. “ _ Quand allons-nous _ ?”

He’s too drunk to realize he’s spoken French, but she answers him easily. When she attempts a response in French sounds it wrong on her tongue, and she looks frustrated. After a moment, she switches back to flawless, if accented, English. “Are you sober enough to leave now?”

He shakes his head regretfully. 

He doesn’t have time to move before she’s rolled on top of him, blade slotting easily between his ribs like he’d expected scant minutes ago. 

He dies, choking on his own blood. He wakes up and spits it out, shoving her off of him. (Gently, though, because he doesn’t actually want to risk hurting her.)

“What was that for?”

“Now you’re sober enough that we can go.” 

It’s faultless logic. 

“Should’ve slit my throat. Faster,” he says, though the words make his throat ache with the memory of Nile’s first death. 

She only shrugs and rolls to her feet. “Come on.”

She does not offer him a hand. He staggers to his feet on his own and tugs off his shirt. “I liked this one,” he gripes, and if he didn’t know better, he’d think there was something that might be a deeply repressed smile twinkling in her eyes. 

If killing him is what it takes to draw something out of her, then he hopes she kills him a thousand times. 

_ Whatever it takes _ , he thinks. After all, he has nothing but time. 

* * *

Andy’s phone rings at three in the morning. 

Joe’s not asleep. He’s been staring at the burner phone he received a call on less than an hour ago. 

Nicky, though,  _ is  _ asleep across the room, dozing on the couch because he fell asleep listening to a new album by some band he likes on his phone. His ears will be sore tomorrow from falling asleep with earbuds in, and Joe will tell him that this is his own fault and he  _ knows  _ what the result of sleeping like that will be, and they’ll bicker until they cannot help but laugh. Joe will kiss the shell of Nicky’s ears and he’ll proclaim that they’re all better, and Andy will roll her eyes and begin drilling Nile on all of the things they’re trying to teach her as a distraction for them both. 

But for now, Joe is awake, because he has heard a cadence of breathing that shook him because it  _ cannot  _ be who he thinks it was, but also, how would anyone find this number? A random misdial would be likely, but it was not a local call, and it makes sense that someone who  _ knows  _ them would find them faster than someone who doesn’t. 

“Copley,” he hears Andy say tersely into the phone, immediately on alert. 

Joe cannot hear what the man says to her. He only knows that less than a minute later, Andy is storming into the room, eyes steely as she takes in Joe, awake, and Nicky, asleep. “Get him up. We’re going.” 

She returns back to the room she shares with Nile. They have taken to sharing a room because Nile still has so many nightmares, and none of them wants to leave Andromache, the most fragile through no fault of her own, undefended as she sleeps. 

He wakes Nicky quickly. His love comes awake soundlessly, eyes bright and alert as he looks at Joe with unquestioning trust. 

“Time to go,” Joe says, and Nicky doesn’t question it. He rolls to his feet and leads the way to their room to begin packing. Their things are never far from their bags, as they’ve developed no habit more ingrained in these long years than to always be ready to run. 

It would be a terrible life, he thinks, if he did not have someone such as Nicky with whom to share it. 

His mind jumps to his brother, or the man he once called such and may one day again, but who, right now, inspires such a deep and primal rage in Joe that he cannot give him such a powerful title. 

A man for whom he would rip out his own heart if it could prevent him any suffering, but who brokered with Joe’s and, more importantly, _Nicky’s_ very bodies like it was his right. 

No. Not his brother. 

But a man who is suffering, almost more than Joe can imagine, and Joe thinks  _ good  _ even as the hitch of breath on the other end of the phone echoes in his ears once more. 

Who else, he thinks, would cry upon hearing his voice? 

They pack quickly and join Andy, who is now with a sleepy but alert Nile in the front room, bags slung over their shoulders and weapons ready. 

“Where are we going?” Nicky asks, his first question of the day. 

“Away,” Andy says shortly. They know her well enough to know that this means  _ anywhere but here,  _ and Nicky nods. 

“Alright. I can drive.” 

They’ve been behind the wheel for ten minutes when Nile asks the question that the men are patiently waiting for Andy to offer an answer to. 

“Is someone after us?”

“To be determined,” Andy answers after a few moments’ pause. “Copley thinks yes. Someone sent him something. Whatever it is, it has him spooked.”

Joe doesn’t want to speak the words he’s about to. He glances at Nicky, though, and then in the rearview mirror at the women who are  _ his  _ in different but equally important ways. “Could it be Booker?”

Andy’s expression doesn’t change. “Why do you ask?”

“I got a phone call. French number. Person didn’t say anything, but…” he trails off. 

Andy nods. Nicky looks staid in a way that means he’s masking strong emotions that he doesn’t want to let out into the world unprocessed. Nile just looks sad. 

“We’ll see,” is all Andy offers in reply. “For now, better safe than, well.” 

“What about Dr. Kozac?” They didn’t manage to kill everyone from the labs; she's the last one to hunt down. In recent months, they’ve chased their prey from Brazil to Bolivia and now to Argentina. To give up the hunt is a risk; leaving anyone alive was already an oversight, and it  _ must  _ be corrected. The less people that know about them the better. 

“Copley will wipe anything that makes it online. We’ll resume the search when it’s safe.” 

Joe feels a deep unease in his gut, but he nods. Andy knows best, and it isn’t even that he thinks she’s  _ wrong.  _ But he hates the loose end that could jeopardize what he holds most dear. 

He reaches out and covers Nicky’s hand, the one that is resting on the gear shift between them. The touch calms him, as it always does, grounding Joe from both his emotions and the way time can make him feel stretched paper thin at the edges, like dough rolled flat under the weight of too many years. 

“America,” he offers into the silence. 

Nile goes tense. Nicky smiles, expression wry. Andy groans. 

“I hate America,” she complains, which means she knows he’s right. It’s the last place anyone would expect them to go, in part because they try so fucking hard to stay away unless the Americans are causing problems amongst each other in the same way they often cause problems in the rest of the world. 

Nicky heads north. They’ll head up through Mexico, maybe. Nicky loves Mexico. If not, maybe they’ll hop around islands in the Caribbean to throw off any pursuit. 

For now, the sun is rising on the horizon and Nile is whispering something to Andy in the backseat that’s making her crack a smile. Nicky is humming along to the song on the radio even though his Spanish is terrible for someone whose first language is Italian, and Joe feels blessedly content and blessedly alive. 

* * *

Quynh expects them to take a boat, and she does not steel herself for the water because she is  _ fine _ . If her hands shake at the thought of leaving, just a slight tremor, well, they are quickly steadied when she sticks a blade in this young boy’s chest. 

He complains about his  _ shirt,  _ of all things. He tries to offer her advice on the best way to murder someone. 

If she could experience affection right now, clearly it would be for this man. She understands why Andromache looked at him with such clear adoration. She does not know why he has been exiled, and she does not need to know. Whether he has done something unforgivable or not, she feels that Yusuf, Nicolo, and Andromache have little room to judge. Not when she considers their abandonment equally as unforgivable as anything she can imagine this man having done.

They  _ left  _ her, and she will take her vengeance. She will also keep Booker from revealing their secret by drinking himself to death and being discovered when he comes back to life. 

This is the generosity she has left; the tacit threat of a blade kept under her pillow, of the ease with which she kills him when he makes stupid choices like drinking when they need to  _ go.  _

She can respect that he understands this part of her. He appears unbothered, as he strips off his bloody shirt and pulls on a new one, grabbing his bag from by the door. “Do you have anything with you?”

“No.” She is wearing a shirt of his that she stole from a drawer of neatly folded clothes. 

He opens his bag once more and pulls out some of the weapons. First is a gun, but when he looks up at her, he shakes his head and puts it away once more. “Gotta teach you to shoot,” he mutters, but he does not seem to actually be addressing her with this comment. He shoves what weapons he’s deemed useful to her into a new bag and kicks that one in her direction. “There. Grab some clothes. We’ll buy you some of your own when we get wherever we’re going.” 

She does as he orders, because  _ this  _ is why she needs him. She does not know how to track in this overcomplicated new world. She will learn--she will watch him  _ until  _ she learns--but for now, he is useful. 

She does not know what she will do with him when he ceases to be useful. She does not know if she has it in her to keep another person around. 

Proximity breeds affection, breeds loyalty, breeds trust. Whether she can still feel those things, she does not know, nor does she intend to find out. 

* * *

Nicky sits on a plane next to Nile five days later. They are currently on a flight from the Dominican Republic, just a quick hop to Orlando and then a short stopover before another flight, this time to New York. 

The two of them are sharing earbuds so they can listen to some of Nile’s favorite songs. Their tastes in music don’t often overlap, and as such Nicky has not heard many of the songs she likes best. But Nicky does not mind listening with her, not in the slightest; her enthusiasm is endearing, and he has always loved music no matter what form it takes. Even if he has preferences, they are not hard and fast; he is nothing if not adaptable to new pleasures. 

Still, he is distracted. He cannot help but glance worriedly over at Andy and Joe every few minutes, seated across the aisle and talking in hushed tones. They have serious looks in their eyes. 

“Should I be worried?” Nile finally asks. Her voice is quiet, but her eyes are anything but afraid. There is determination in her, a resolve that is rare. It is something that he loves about this young woman who he has already begun to see as his sister.

“Not yet,” Nicky assures her, and it isn’t optimism that motivates him so much as a deep faith that Andy and Joe have it more than handled. 

If it was something they needed to worry about, Nile and Nicky would already know, because the other two wouldn’t risk hiding something important over something as irrelevant as their peace of mind. 

“Show me more music,” he prompts, and she holds his gaze for a few more seconds before she complies, turning on a song called  _ Godspeed.  _

“This is one of my favorites,” she tells him. “Actually, I think it’s what I was listening to when Andy kidnapped me.” 

He smiles. He tilts his head back, eyes closed as he listens. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation: 
> 
> Quand allons-nous? - When are we going?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: nightmares, drowning mentions

_ It's everything you wanted, it's everything you don't _

_ It's one door swinging open and one door swinging closed _

_ Some prayers find an answer, some prayers never know _

_ We're holding on and letting go _

(Holding On and Letting Go - Ross Coperman) 

Nile uses a payphone in Orlando to call her mother. She does this halfway through their five hour layover, spaced out enough from each flight that it hopefully won’t look (to anyone who might be monitoring her mother’s phone line still) like she’s overeager or, on the flip side, running away. 

She’s both, but that’s neither here nor there. 

Andy stands next to her, a quiet presence that would once have felt stifling and now feels supportive. 

She wishes, almost, for someone else. She loves Andy, but they’ve been through this before; Andy’s sadness over her family is a different beast. Her memories of them are limited at best and nonexistent at worst. Her family, as far as she can remember or afford to care, is them and them alone. 

Nile does not have that dubious luxury. Her mother’s voice, when she answers the phone, is familiar. It sounds like Nile’s heart breaking. 

“Hello?” she asks. “Who’s calling?”

She sounds tired, worn and sad, and Nile hates herself for putting her mom through this. Hates that she doesn’t have any better choices, that allowing a clean break is best for everyone. 

Hates, for a sickening moment, that her mom and brother won’t have to carry this pain for nearly as long as she will. 

She hangs up the phone and stares at it for an undetermined amount of time; she doesn’t count the seconds as they pass. 

She doesn’t move, barely breathes, until she feels a firm grip on her shoulder. “Come on,” Andy says, but it isn’t unkind. “Joe’s on a quest for fried chicken. We should find where he and Nicky ended up.” 

Nile inhales a shaking breath, then lets out a steady exhale. She glances over at Andy and feels a love so strong it surprises her that she’s known this woman for so short a time. Andy has shaped her life beyond measure, changed her in ways that have helped her blossom into this version of herself. Whether this version of Nile is better, worse, or simply who she was always meant to be… she doesn’t, can’t, know. 

But she doesn’t know that she would trade it, especially not if trading it meant taking her last gasps of air tasting blood and breathing in the dust kicked up by her frantic sisters-in-arms in Afghanistan. 

Sisters who she knew longer and yet somehow loved her less completely than Andromache, a warrior out of time. 

“Let’s go,” she agrees, and Andy links their arms and tugs her off into the bustle of the crowded airport. 

* * *

By the time they make it to Argentina, the location that Booker traced the phone call back to is empty. Booker does not allow himself to show his relief, barely allows himself to feel it. 

Quynh clears the rooms with a sword in her hand, a katana she’d purchased before they left France and packed into her checked baggage. When she gets to the second room, she slices through the pillows on the bed and her eyes echo a scream that she doesn’t give sound. 

She turns to look at Booker. “They were here.” 

“Yes,” he promises. He realizes after a moment that she wasn’t asking, though, or doubting the information he’d given her. “How do you know?” 

She crosses back to the kitchen and yanks open a cupboard half-full of tea. 

“I dreamed this.” 

Booker feels a chill. He’s met them all; his dreams are void of glimpses into their lives, now, no matter how much he would give to have that for any of them. Even Quynh’s, because then she wouldn’t be here with dreams that were beacon straight to his family. 

Could he get her close enough to Nile that the dreams would stop without endangering Andy’s safety? 

No, he decides after a heart-stopping moment. He can’t risk that. 

“What did you see?” he asks, his voice rough. Luckily, his voice is always rough; it should be unnoticeable, or passed off as roughened by the betrayal Quynh assumes he must also feel. 

“Nicolo,” she says, and she spits his name like a curse. “And  _ her.”  _

He’s surprised at the venom that comes through in her tone when he realizes, after a moment, that she must be referencing Nile. 

“Why do you hate Nile?” he asks without thinking, surprised into voicing the question before he can think better of the impulse. 

Quynh does not answer. Instead, she painstakingly slices open each tea bag and washes the tea leaves down the sink. 

Booker sighs and checks the place over for any clues as to where they might have gone. As he expects, there is no trace left behind that might tell him anything. 

He sees a book on the table, poetry. He thinks of Joe’s voice, suspicious in his ears and still the best sound he’s heard in months. 

He tucks the book under his arm and rejoins Quynh. “Have you seen anything that could tell us where we should go?” 

“Not yet.” 

He knows without asking that she does not want to stay here. He doesn’t either; he can feel the echo of his family all around him, and it feels wrong to seek comfort in their nearness when they would not want him to, when they have not forgiven him. 

When he has done so little yet to earn it. 

“Let’s go then,” he says. He offers his arm. 

Quynh takes it, her touch delicate as she curls her fingers around his bicep. She is as dangerous as a snake poised to strike--and for all her deadly potential, he loves her. Because his family loves her, and he loves his family. 

And, he can admit, because even this is so much better than being alone. 

He is doing his best not to be a coward, but he’s still nothing more than a man who loathes his own company. 

“I have not seen the coast of Patagonia in many years,” Quynh offers after a moment. 

Booker nods. He knows from the others’ stories the general region where Patagonia is now part of modern-day Chile. They climb into the car they stole and he heads southwest. Until they have a direction, Chile is as good as anywhere else. 

He can give her this. 

He hopes, with every fibre of his being, that it helps. 

* * *

Andy slips out of their hotel room at five am on a Monday morning. She leaves a note-- _b_ _ ack soon-- _ and glances back just long enough to check that all three are still asleep. Nile is splayed out into most of the warm space Andy has left behind; Joe and Nicky on the other bed. Joe is curled so close to Nicky’s back that it would take a crowbar to pry them apart. 

She makes sure the door doesn’t even click as it closes behind her, shrugging on her jacket and taking the stairs down from the seventh floor before making her way out into the quiet (well, relatively quiet, quiet _ er)  _ streets. 

She makes her way to Central Park. It’s a long walk, and she feels almost tired by the end of it. Her new stamina is endlessly surprising; still better than the average human’s by a longshot, but it’s undeniably diminished. 

She sits down on a bench and stares at the joggers going by. 

Her phone rings in her pocket just as she’s beginning to contemplate coffee, more for the taste and warmth than any of its effects, although she can’t down endless pots with quite the same certainty that it won’t hurt her any longer. 

Coffee was a good invention. 

She remembers when Quynh first tried it and almost spit it out, making an adorable face as she asked,  _ why, Andromache, why would anyone drink that?  _

Andy does not fear death. It can be no less terrible than facing the world without Quynh by her side after millennia together. 

Her one regret is that she’ll die without Quynh by her side. 

She answers the phone. “Talk to me.” 

“New York.” 

“Yes,” she agrees. 

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“It’s one of the most surveilled places on the planet, Andromache.” 

Her heart aches when Copley calls her that. Not many people bother. It makes her think of dark hair and wild eyes and a bright grin. It makes her think of  _ home.  _

“Easier to go unnoticed, then,” she points out. “We’re just a few faces amongst millions, Copley.” 

He lets out a sigh that she knows hides aggravation. “I haven’t had any more messages.” 

“Good.” 

“Keep an eye out regardless.” 

She refuses to dignify that with a response. 

“Be careful,” he admonishes. “You won’t regenerate, and you’ll find that gunshot wounds are a bitch when they stick around.”

She tsks. Has he forgotten so soon that she already knows this? “We’ll be fine. You do your job and figure out who the files came from.” 

_Files,_ plural, may be an exaggeration. What he'd been sent was a police report about a missing woman in France, a train ticket to Paris from the near the coast, and a coded warning--just their location in Argentina, precise coordinates that had spooked Copley into sending them to ground in the first place. 

She hangs up and finds she has lost the will to seek out coffee, breakfast, or any place warmer. The chill fades a bit as the sun begins to heat up the air and ground around her, although with winter fast approaching, even the sun can only do so much. 

Someone takes a seat beside her. She doesn’t need to look to know who it is. 

“Yusuf,” she greets, because it is that kind of morning.

“You’ve been out here for a long time.”

She glances at the screen of her phone, still clutched in her hand. It’s just past nine in the morning. “Hardly.” 

“Nile wants New York bagels.” 

Andy laughs. “Of course she does.” The first thing Nile had made them do was get pizza, only to declare it not as good as Chicago’s. This Nicky took as an absolute affront, swearing that they needed to go to Rome as soon as possible to correct her misplaced opinion that Chicago deep dishes were superior to all other forms of the food. 

Yusuf thinks a good pizza is a good pizza no matter where it’s from, and Andy will eat just about anything you put in front of her, so they simply enjoyed watching the two argue over something that was so meaningless that it would clearly be a sticking point between them for centuries to come. 

She may not be around for the centuries that the trivial rivalry will last, but it brings her joy to have been here for the birth of it, at least. 

“Can’t miss that,” she decides after a few more moments. She stands and raises an eyebrow at him. “Lead the way.” 

* * *

Quynh wakes up screaming. It is not the first time; Booker knows it will not be the last. 

He has learned through painful experience not to wake her, nor should he touch her just after she wakes. 

They do not share a bed, so he just sits up and clicks on the light. He does not look at her, giving her time to get her ragged breathing under control before he glances over. He knows how important the appearance of strength is to Quynh because he feels a mirror image of the need within himself. 

He does not think this  _ is  _ a show of weakness, of course not. He’s felt it. He understands more than anyone other than Nile could hope to--more, though, because he’s felt it, in snatches of fractured dreams, for hundreds of years. 

He glances over when her breathing is steady once more. She’s in soft pyjama shorts and a matching shirt, because when she’d run her fingers across the material she’d been transfixed and he couldn’t resist buying them for her. They had been cheap, anyway, at a Walmart he’d insisted they stop at to stock up on supplies now that he and Quynh have made it to the United States. 

She’d had a dream of Nile surrounded by people speaking English accented like Nile's, not just the others attempting to include their only monoglot but also the strangers she encountered in shops and passed by on the streets. A city, Quynh had said, with tall buildings. But that’s all she’d been able to offer. 

That’s fine. America is large. It will be hard to find them there, and that will give him and Quynh time to search. 

“What do you need?”

She looks at him, dark eyes as fathomless as the sea. She says nothing, and he reads her answer just as clear in the silence. 

With a sigh, he stands and begins to gather up the few things that have made their way out of his duffel. “Let’s get on the road. We can find a Waffle House. I want to see your face when you try their food.”

She curls her lip at him in response, but he knows this is because that’s the closest she can come to smiling. He’s learning to read her despite the fact that she’s so different from the woman he knows from pieced-together snippets of stories. 

He’s coming to love her, even with the darkness and blots out any light that might be trying to guide her home. 

* * *

Nile falls asleep that night stuffed full of pasta and bread from a nice Italian restaurant in Manhattan. Nicky had won the four-way competition to find the best bagels in New York, with only Joe, of all people, voting against him. He chose an Italian restaurant for their dinner that night and then complained cheerfully about the quality of the food in Italian the whole time. Joe, seated next to Nile and absolutely playing footsie with Nicky under the table, translated Nicky's comments for her in low tones. 

She’d laughed more than she can remember doing in years, drank plenty of expensive wine that honestly tastes the same to her as the shit you can buy in a box, and then she’d collapsed into bed happy and tipsy and feeling like she loves everything about the world. 

Her dreams take that away from her. She feels emptiness covering a simmering wrath broken only by flashes of irritation as the man next to her sings loudly in French along to the Les Misérables soundtrack. 

In the dream, she does not know this detail: does not know what the music is, only that she  _ hates  _ it almost as much as she hates everything else. 

She sees her reflection in the side mirror and then Nile wakes up with a start, sitting bolt upright and with Quynh’s name on her lips. 

* * *

Nicky is happily asleep when he’s ripped from what are, for once, pleasant dreams. Nile’s voice draws him toward wakefulness, and then Andy’s brings him the rest of the way. 

“Are you alright?” Andy is asking, and Nicky sees that she has one hand resting against Nile’s back when he opens his eyes. 

Nile is shaking. She looks over desperately at Nicky and says, “Quynh’s not in the water anymore.” 

Everyone freezes. Nicky meets her eyes, more scared than he’s seen them since her first night with them. He offers her a small smile even though he feels as though he is standing on the edge of a great precipice, where the fall may not kill him but the impact will still fucking hurt. 

“You’re sure?” he asks, not because he questions it, but so that the others can hear it aloud when she affirms it. 

“Yes.” 

“Where is she?” Andy’s voice is hollow, her eyes haunted. 

Joe’s fingers are tight around Nicky’s wrist; he tugs free only to lace their fingers together and squeeze back just as hard. 

“Here,” Nile says. “Or, well. The United States, definitely.” 

“Definitely?” Joe asks, his voice hoarse from more than sleep. 

“There was a drink from Whataburger in the cupholder,” Nile says, her voice disbelieving. 

“ _ Where,”  _ Andy demands again. Her voice is more desperate than Nicky has ever heard it. By the time he and Joe rescued her in England,  _ after,  _ she’d been too despondent to be desperate. 

In the decades of searching, she’d been hopeless and unreachable, and only in the centuries after--and, he can admit, after Booker joined them for good--did she begin to heal. Never completely; this was a scar that would last forever, one that would always be sensitive to the touch. 

But now she seems flayed apart by this news, and Nicky pulls away from Joe to go sit on the edge of Andy and Nile’s bed. He reaches out, offering a hand to Andy palm up. She ignores it, looking right through it--and him--for minutes before she seems to notice it all at once, reaching out and taking hold with a hard grip. 

In the meantime, Joe has been grilling Nile about what she remembers. 

It takes a while for her to say, hesitantly, “Guys… Quynh’s not alone.” 

“Good,” Joe says in relief. “That’s good, right?”

Nicky has a dreadful feeling he knows what is coming. 

“She’s… she’s with Booker.” 

Andy’s grip spasms around Nicky’s hand. Joe straightens, spine ramrod straight. “What?”

“And… I think they’re looking for us.” 

* * *

Booker isn’t even trying to hide. He uses aliases that are familiar to them as he makes his way through west Texas to New Mexico and then up to Colorado. 

He hopes they think to track him that way, hopes that Nile has dreamed of Quynh awake, and traversing the states, and most importantly with Booker by her side. 

Quynh’s dreams start to lead him toward thinking they should go north. Her descriptions of leaves falling off of trees mean they aren’t likely in the South, where that hasn’t begun in earnest yet. 

He drives them north, but he doesn’t drive them east. Not yet. Quynh hasn’t spent much time in the United States, doesn’t know one way from the other, and Michigan in the fall is close enough to where Booker suspects they might actually be. 

When they drive past signs for Chicago, Booker thinks of Nile with a pang in his heart. He won’t get a chance to know her, for real, for years yet. 

He hopes she’s safe. 

He hopes her family is well. 

He wonders if she’s keeping tabs on them. He thinks he might look them up; he can do that for her, in case it’s too painful for her while they’re still alive. It’s information she might want a few hundred years down the line, and it’ll save her the heartache of searching the information out if he already has it for her. 

He bypasses Ann Arbor for Detroit. He likes the former better, but the latter is an easier place to go unnoticed. 

Quynh looks out at the buildings around the and frowns. “Close,” she murmurs. “But not quite.” 

Booker keeps his face impassive. He does not allow his fingers to tighten on the steering wheel. “Probably not out west then,” he forces himself to say casually. “We can head east tomorrow.”

_ Please,  _ he begs silently,  _ keep moving. Please don’t wait for us to catch you.  _


	4. Chapter 4

_ I'm thinkin' about you _

_ And I don't know what I should do _

_ And I don't know if you're feelin' it too _

_ But you don't know what I'm goin' through _

_ Thinkin about you  _

(Thinking About You - Fred Eaglesmith)

  
  


Andy spends the next day curled up in bed, eyes distant while she is overcome with memories in a way she never allows herself to be. 

Millennia, plural, of memories are not meant to crowd into one human brain. She balances them well, usually, through sheer force of will. But now she cannot balance them; every beat of her heart brings with it another moment from her past. 

She feels the pervasive loneliness from when she was young, so young (and yet older than Nile and Booker both, but still a baby compared to who she is now). 

She sees Quynh, lips split and parched from the unrelenting heat of the desert, the most lovely person Andy had ever seen despite it all. 

Quynh, Quynh,  _ Quynh _ . Andy sees endless flashes of their years together, decades passing in the blink of an eye, the only commonality the fierce and joyous grin on Quynh’s face. 

The others talk around her, giving up on talking  _ to  _ her after a few hours pass and she gives no response. She can hear them, faintly, but the memories easily drown them out. 

They’re arguing. 

She doesn’t know what they’ll decide. She doesn’t know what  _ she’ll  _ decide. She’s so tired already; it would be so easy to let them make this decision for her.

She hung on long enough to hear Nile say that Quynh is after them with anger in her heart because she blames them for giving her up as lost. After that, Andy is pulled under, the crush of her memories drowning her as effectively as the water that kept Quynh from her for these hundreds of years. 

When Andy blinks back to awareness, Joe and Nicky are gone and Nile is sitting on their bed, staring down at her phone. She glances worried over at Andy after a few moments and quickly puts the phone away, giving Andy her full attention. 

The weight of it, the expectation in that gaze, is too much for Andy right now. She stands. “I’m going out,” she says, stripping efficiently and putting on tight jeans and a loose shirt, her leather jacket on top in deference to the cold and her ability to actually catch a cold now. 

“I don’t think that’s--” Nile starts. 

Andy leaves, the click of the hotel door behind her cutting off whatever protest Nile was going to make. 

* * *

Quynh likes every big city they pass through. They’re foreign and jarring in their largeness, their noises. The angry cacophony of car horns sounds like the jumbled up fragments in her mind, memories and dreams that get clearer every day but  _ hurt  _ as they come into clarity. It feels like she has stared too long at the sun after being somewhere very dark, like walking out of a cave into the midday light with no trees around to make shade. 

All of these things are terrible, but they are so much easier to handle than open spaces and easily offered kindnesses. The harsh and jarring reality is so much more bearable, matching the way she feels and not making her feel so completely out of place. They are loud and messy and chaotic, all the things she feels about her mind and her emotions. 

She belongs. 

Quynh is torn about whether or not to avoid sleep. She hates the memories that come to her when she is not conscious to fight them back. The dreams of the others, or of their memories, are fine. They give Quynh clues about where she and Booker should go next. They also give her insight into the man who is now always beside her, when she remembers what it was like to dream from his perspective. And they give her insight into  _ her,  _ the new girl, Nile. 

Booker once asked her why she hates Nile. 

She does not know how to say  _ I hate her because she has that which I do not want, but that no one else should possess.  _

She hates Nile for the same reason she would have hated Booker, had she been released from her ocean prison before his exile and whatever caused it. 

She already hates her brothers for abandoning her just like Andromache did. She hates them for that so much that it is impossible to hate them for being in Andromache’s presence--there is no room left for  _ more  _ of an emotion as intense as what she already feels about them. 

Andromache is, as she always has been, an exception. 

Quynh loves her almost as much as she hates her, and the love fuels the betrayal, which fuels the hatred. It is an endless cycle in which she grows angrier by the day, grows more ferocious with each memory that comes back to her of  _ you and me  _ and  _ until the end.  _

She should not hate Nile. Nile, for a short time that she knows from Booker’s stories must have been less than a year, provided a reprieve to Quynh. She did not dream under the ocean, but she died, and when she died, sometimes her mind gave her images of them. Whatever curse kept generating breath in her lungs also gave her the momentary reprieve of witnessing these children’s awakenings, their early days as immortals. 

They did not give her hope, but they gave her sanctuary. 

But Nile sleeps pressed against Andromache in a place where only Quynh belongs, and she is all too comfortable with the feeling of hatred to feel anything else. 

She cannot put that into words, though. She could not when Booker asked, and she cannot now, even after days of thought on the matter, days of untangling the worn strings of her own raw feelings and following them back to their sources. 

She would not tell him even if she could. 

He thinks she does not see how he loves them still. But Quynh has always had the eyes of a bird of prey. She watches him, and she plans, and she makes contingencies for those plans if they fall through. No matter what he chooses when he is faced with the choice of helping Quynh or helping the others, she will be ready. 

Insanity is an easy label to hide behind. The truth is, she is jumbled up and full of jagged edges, but those edges get smoother and begin to piece back together with each passing day. 

* * *

Joe and Nicky don’t go far. They go out to get dinner, which is really just hot dogs off of a cart before they sit on benches in a small nearby park and eat in silence. 

The silence is heavy. When you’ve spent as many years together as them, silences speak volumes of their own. Between them, most are comfortable: worn and soft like blankets, cozy and safe. 

This silence is not that. It is a silence filled with unspoken words that Nicky can hear just as clearly as if they had been said aloud. 

“She is dangerous,” Joe says finally. 

Nicky nods. He’s not arguing that point. It’s everything that hinges on that point that’s currently up for debate. 

“She’s our sister.” 

Joe dips his chin, a short nod of assent. Yes, this will always be true; Quynh is  _ theirs  _ the same as Andy, as Nile. 

Nicky doesn’t allow himself to flinch when he thinks of Andy, when he feels Joe’s thoughts follow the same train. 

He knows what is coming next. It doesn’t surprise him when Joe says, “If we lose Andy, it’s for good.” 

The argument under his words is,  _ there will be time to help Quynh after.  _

Nicky… understands. He does. 

But he aches for his sister who needs him, needs them, and most of all, needs Andy. It’s not her fault that she doesn’t know it yet, that she needs to hold on to her anger to keep herself going. 

“We cannot abandon her twice, Joe.” 

Joe hums, a noncommittal sound that means nothing more than that he is considering this. Joe has told Nicky so many times that he is kindness overflowing, and Nicky cannot say he disagrees entirely. He has a fire in him that can only be assuaged by helping as many people as he can, by seeing wrongs in the world and correcting them. If doing so is kindness, then he is undoubtedly kind. 

But Joe is not  _ un _ kind. He is simply protective above all else, and their family will always come first. 

Quynh is family, but Andy is breakable. If Andy dies, this is it.

Nicky knows where Joe will fall on this, and he knows where he  _ must  _ fall on this. Although this happens rarely, it is not something that has never happened before. They are their own people, for all that they have worn down each other’s rough edges and made homes for each other in the soft spaces left behind. They can, and will, disagree. 

“We--” Joe starts, but his phone ringing cuts him off. He curses, digging into his pockets, already tense as he connects the call and puts it to his ear. “Nile.” 

“Andy left,” she says, sounding frantic. “I don’t know where she went. I tried to follow, but she lost me.”

Nicky takes the phone from Joe. “Where are you now?” he asks. She tells him, and he commits it to memory easily. “We’ll be there soon. Don’t move.” 

He hangs up the phone and passes it back to Joe. As Joe tucks the phone in his pocket, face grim enough that it could be carved from marble, Nicky squeezes his shoulder. “She’s fine,” he promises. “Sometimes she needs space.” 

Joe nods. It isn’t agreement, simply acknowledgement. Until they know where Andy is, he’s going to worry. 

Nicky cannot worry about Andy; she can take care of herself. Joe will worry for the both of them, and Nicky will collect their baby sister, comfort her and search with her and make sure she eats dinner. He will make her coffee if they have to stay up late waiting for Andy to come back to them. 

Joe protects, and Nicky cares. 

It’s why they work so seamlessly as a unit. 

“ _ Ti amo _ ,” Nicky says, standing and offering a hand to pull Joe to his feet, a flimsy excuse for continued touch. 

“ _ Amore mio,”_ Joe replies with a brief but genuine smile. “Come on. Nile’s waiting.” 

__

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* * *

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Nicky somehow convinces Nile that they should go back to the hotel to wait for Andy in case she shows up before Joe can track her down. 

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If they had Booker, this would be easier; for all that Joe and Nicky have known her longer, she and Booker always had a sixth sense it seemed, an ability to find each other effortlessly anywhere in the world. The streets of Manhattan would have been nothing for him. 

__

__

Joe thinks more about Booker as he searches. He’s spent so many weeks trying  _ not  _ to think about that phone call, but now he wonders. Was Booker trying to locate them? Should Joe have hung up right away? 

__

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Or was he trying to… what? Warn them? 

__

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Joe doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to trust Booker anymore, not after he did what he did to them all. 

__

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It feels like a betrayal to his family to almost wish Booker was here, or to acknowledge that things might be easier if he was. Joe has been trying, so hard, to fill the empty space at Andy’s side that was left first by Quynh, and now by Book himself. But it’s hard, after thousands of years alive, to try to fit into any place except his own well-worn niche in their family. 

__

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Nile might do better, but she’s so young, too young to have such a responsibility. 

__

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Joe leans against a wall, tilting his head back, face up to the sky, eyes closed as he  _ thinks.  _ He does not pray, but he simply asks the idea of his not-brother,  _ what would you do if you were here?  _

__

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As soon as he asks it, he knows exactly what Booker would have done. He wouldn’t have left Andy alone, because he would have known exactly what she needed. 

__

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Joe finds the nearest dive bar, and the next when Andy’s not there, and finally at the third he hears the shouting before he even opens the door. 

__

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It’s devastation, broken glass and pieces of wood from tables and chairs littering the floor. In the middle of it all is Andy, mortal and yet so much  _ more  _ regardless. 

__

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Joe takes in the rhythm of the fight for a moment, and then he jumps in, effortlessly making his way to Andy’s side so he can have her back. 

__

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It doesn’t take long for it to end, especially now that there’s two of them. When the fight is over, people are left groaning on the floor. As quiet settles over them, Joe wraps an arm around Andy’s shoulders and tugs her out the door and into the night. “Feel better?” he asks, and he tries not to let it come out judgmental. She has every right to cope in whatever way she sees fit. Her life is hers to risk. 

__

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But he’s so  _ aware,  _ every moment, that a stray knife or bullet could end her--permanently. And he’s not ready to be without her yet. 

__

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(He doesn’t know that he’ll ever be ready to be without her, but at least in a few decades maybe he’ll have prepared himself slightly better than he has now, still reeling from so many shocks. From the discovery and addition of Nile to their family, from Booker’s betrayal, from all that happened in the labs at Merrick Pharmaceuticals, and most of all from the discovery of Andy’s new mortality.

__

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He knows, he  _ knows,  _ that when it is her time to die, she will die, and nothing he does can prevent it from happening forever. He believes it when the words come from Nicky’s mouth, anyway. 

__

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But that cannot stop him from doing everything to prolong the time he has left. He is not Booker, who believes in nothing, who believes that life is a curse. But he is not Nicky, either, who believes that everything happens for a reason. 

__

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Everything happens, Joe knows. But everyone has their role in things, and if his role is to keep those he loves safe--well, what better role could he ask for in the end?)

__

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He tries not to let it come off as judgmental, but it still does, because his worry and frustration easily morph into the more palatable annoyance. 

__

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She glances at him sidelong, unamused. “What did you decide?”

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“You’re the boss.” 

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She leans a little more heavily on his side. “Not sure I’ll make the best call on this one.” 

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“Are you hurt?” 

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She shrugs. “Nothing that won’t heal.” 

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He takes her word for it. At this point, he’s not sure he would know the difference, but Andy is gaining experience with mortality with each passing day. She and Nile are the experts, so they’ll just have to get back to Nicky and Nile as fast as they can. 

__

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“Nicky and I have yet to come to a consensus.” 

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“Nile?”

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“She’s scared.”

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Andy’s arm is around Joe’s waist, so he feels her fingers spasm into a fist at the words. “She’d know best.” 

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“Yes,” Joe agrees. “But Nicky…” He does not need to say more; Andy knows, almost as well as he does, all that Nicky is. 

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“Best to go.” Andy’s voice betrays none of the pain Joe knows she feels at the decision. “We can always let them catch up later. I won’t risk you three.” 

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Joe knows better than to say that the three of them can take care of themselves. There are ways to hurt even an immortal, and Quynh would know that best. None of them are safe, even if Andy is the most fragile. 

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“What about--” Joe starts to ask. 

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Andy cuts him off. “I don’t know.” 

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“Okay.” He won’t press; if she doesn’t want to talk about Booker on top of Quynh, he understands. “Come on. Nile’s worried.” 

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She sighs but picks up the pace. 

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* * *

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Nile leaps up and waits anxiously by the door when Joe and Andy come back. Andy has a split lip, a blackening eye, and a peace to her that Nile should have known to expect. Of course she’d gone and found a fight. 

__

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Still, Nile gestures Andy toward the center of the room and quickly pats her down, searching for any injuries. There’s bruises, definitely, Nile doesn’t need to see Andy’s skin to know that. But no points of pressure make her express any pain, and while her pain tolerance is crazy high, that’s a good enough sign for now. 

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Nile wilts in relief. “I’m glad you’re back,” she says, and then she grabs her clothes and goes into the bathroom to shower and take a few moments to decompress. 

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She loves them. She does. But spending every moment of every day with them can be exhausting no matter how much she likes them, and moments like this are more important for her sanity than she could ever hope to describe. 

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She listens to the water and tries not to have flashbacks to Quynh, drowning. It’s not usually an issue, but Quynh has been at the forefront of her mind today as she tried to explain to the others why she’s so afraid of her. 

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She feels less insane now, but no less angry. Everything she does, every emotion she feels, is tinged with blinding rage. 

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Just that would be bad enough. But beneath that, there’s a cool calculation to her, and that is what makes Nile so certain she’s a real threat. They would be foolish to underestimate her. Quynh is dangerous; Nile is sure of that fact. 

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She hopes Joe had some success convincing Nicky or getting through to Andy. 

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When she finally turns off the shower, the water is beginning to cool and her mind is tired of going in circles. She dresses and makes her way back into the room they’re all sharing. 

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Everything that had migrated out of their bags has been packed once more and she tries not to visibly wilt in relief. A small smile that Joe offers her says she has not been entirely successful. 

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“We’re leaving?” she asks. 

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“Tomorrow morning,” Joe tells her. “Early. Best to sleep and then be on our way. We’ve been here long enough.” 

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She nods and climbs into bed next to Andy. The other woman is lying facing the wall, and she doesn’t move as Nile settles in beside her. 

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“Goodnight,” she tells the others, even though it’s only evening still, the sun barely sunken below the horizon. 

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She hopes, hopes, hopes that she doesn’t have any more fucking dreams. 

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* * *

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Booker wakes with a start from his own nightmares of Quynh’s time under the water. Two hundred years of glimpses was nothing compared to her more than five hundred years of living it, but it doesn’t mean it was a walk in the park, either. 

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She is sitting on the second bed, awake and wide-eyed. She looks at him gasping in air with eyes that are as blank as he’s come to expect. 

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It’s fucked up that the blankness, its familiarity, has become its own kind of comfort. 

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“I’m here.” 

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“You are,” he agrees. “With me.” 

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“Yes.” 

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It’s not like with Andy; he can’t read volumes of texts in her silences. But he can read behind the words she does offer, and he can offer his own in turn. 

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She is here, and he is not alone. 

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He hopes that she forgives him for undermining her ruthless plans every chance he gets. Not that there are many of those, but he knows better than to think his family can (or will) evade them forever. 

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He still hopes that she will find a measure of peace before anything happens that he needs to step in and prevent. But he is not so optimistic as to think that will actually be the case. 

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Her rage is not a fire that will burn itself out any time soon. 

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His betrayal may do nothing but stoke the flames higher. 

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But he cannot leave her alone; not for her sake, and not for his. He has to try.

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“Go back to sleep.” He looks up at her when she speaks, his brow furrowed. “Your thinking is loud. It’s distracting me.”

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He doesn’t want to know what kind of thoughts are going on in that mind of hers. So he rolls over and goes back to sleep. 

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He won’t realize until the next morning that he gave her his back and didn’t think twice about it. 

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Well. It’s not like she can kill him anyway.

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	5. Chapter 5

_ So, don't stop me now _

_ Don't stop me _

_ 'Cause I'm having a good time,  _

_ Having a good time _

(Don’t Stop Me Now - Queen)

They spend the next few days driving. They swap cars a few times, but the way they’re being tracked means that it won’t help them too much. Quynh can see what Nile sees, and they never know what moments or details will pass over to her. 

Nile opens her mouth at one point to offer that they should just leave her behind and let Quynh catch her. Nicky reaches over where he’s settled beside her in the backseat and takes her hand, squeezing it gently. When she meets his eyes, he shakes his head. 

So she doesn’t say it, and they keep driving, taking turns at the wheel every few hours. 

They don’t make a straight shot north. They loop through Pennsylvania and New Jersey before heading back up through upstate New York, passing through Vermont and New Hampshire and finally into Maine. 

It’s quaint, a part of the country Nile has never visited before. She wonders if it always feels eerie, or if that’s the time of year and how cold and remote everything looks up here. 

Or, she thinks, maybe it’s that they’re being hunted by someone they can’t escape from forever. Maybe it’s the knowledge that for as long as they do, they’ll be on the run. 

Copley tells them not to head north into Canada, so they swing back down into Massachusetts. Nile kind of wants to go to Boston and do all the tourist things, but that’s not conducive to keeping a low profile. 

“We’ll come back some time,” Joe promises her when he sees her looking longingly out the car windows. She’s in the front with him, Nicky asleep on Andy’s shoulder in the back. “I promise.” 

She nods. “Teach me more Italian?” she asks. She’s been trying to learn; it’s all Nicky and Joe seem to want to speak with one another, and it seems fitting that it should be the first foreign language she learns now, too. 

She wonders, if things had been different, if maybe it would have been French. She’s heard there’s more overlap with English there. 

But she won’t ask them to teach her that. She can wait a hundred years. There’s plenty of languages to learn in the meantime. 

“Tell me what you’ve learned so far,” he says. “Then we’ll go over the things you can’t remember right away.” 

She groans. Practice has never been her favorite part of learning, and it seems all she does these days is practice to gain new skills. 

She catches a glimpse in the mirror of Andy’s smirk in the backseat though, and it soothes any irritation away. She’s always been a little ride or die, and for these three? She’d do pretty much anything. 

_ Even  _ practice vocabulary. Yuck. 

* * *

They slowly wind their way east. Booker refuses to drive for longer than eight hours in a day; he can easily do up to fifteen, but Quynh doesn’t know that. If this is his best way to give the others a chance to keep their head start, he’s going to take it. 

Quynh argues that if they crash, they won’t  _ die,  _ so it really doesn’t matter if he drives when he’s too tired. 

Booker snaps at her--the only time he has--that he’s not in the business of killing innocent people, nor the business of risking their lives, and that if she doesn’t want to ride with him, she can find another way to track the others. 

She stabs him, but non-fatally, and he thinks he sees something close to respect in her eyes after that. 

The first song Quynh shows an interest in is ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ Booker thinks,  _ of course,  _ because he’s never understood the zealous passion others--Nicky and Andy included--feel for the song. It’s good, he’s not saying it’s not, but there’s a lot of equally good music in his opinion. 

He does not voice this opinion, though. He’s pretty sure Quynh would stab him if he tried. 

Instead, he hooks up the aux cord and puts ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on repeat. 

On the fifteenth listen, when Booker has caved and begun drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat, Quynh begins to sing. 

Her voice is lovely. There’s an emotion to it when she sings that is absent from her speech. She sounds sad most of all; this does not surprise Booker, but it  _ does  _ relieve him. Even if she does not know it, if the sadness can edge out the anger, things can be fixed instead of broken further. 

Booker loves Andy. He knows that she had to stop looking for Quynh because it was destroying her. He’s talked to Joe and Nicky, he knows what those years looked like from the impressionist images painted by their words. 

But he knows that she broke the bridge between her and Quynh when she stopped looking, and he knows that Quynh is more interested in burning what’s left than repairing it. 

When the song fades out for the fiftieth (or so) time, Quynh takes the phone and pauses it. 

“I like this song.” 

He nods. He knows she wants him to hear something behind the words, but this time he doesn’t understand. “It’s a good song.” 

“Sometimes I think this is the dream. That I’m still there.” 

Booker’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel, his knuckles going white. “You’re here,” he says, his voice rough. “Do you want me to stab you so you can feel it?” Same principle as pinching someone who’s had a bad dream, he thinks, except this way she can feel herself heal, and she’ll know. 

“Yes.” 

He holds the wheel with one hand and digs in his pocket with the other. He pulls out a switchblade and flicks it open before reaching out and stabbing it into Quynh’s thigh. 

She doesn’t even cry out, just makes a small, involuntary noise. He lets go of the blade, allowing her to pull it free. 

She does, and he watches the road, but he can see out of the corner of his eye as she wipes the blood away a few moments later to reveal healed skin. 

“That hurt,” she says, her voice wondering. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. “Fuckin’ payback for all the times you’ve done it to me.” 

She laughs. It still sounds somewhat unhinged, but there is  _ joy  _ in the sound. “You only got me because I let you,” she tells him. 

“I know,” he promises, a wry twist to his own lips. “You’re the scariest person in this car. I haven’t forgotten that.” 

He wants to say,  _ I wouldn’t hurt you on purpose.  _

He doesn’t. 

He wishes that were true, but he knows better. If it came down to Quynh or Andy, he would always choose Andy. And not just, he can admit to himself, because Quynh is the one who can heal. 

Booker once said that he had lost everyone he loved. He was too blinded by his misery to realize that it wasn’t true until he thought he’d killed the one person left he loved the most. 

He misses Andy every day, but knowing she’s alive is enough. Knowing that he wasn’t the one to kill his best friend  _ is  _ enough--it has to be. 

So if it came down to Andy or Quynh, he wouldn’t hesitate. 

But if he drives slowly enough, maybe it won’t have to. 

Quynh hits play on the song again. He holds in a groan and silently resigns himself to spending the foreseeable future listening to Queen. 

(But this time, when she sings along, he joins in.)

* * *

When Quynh dreams, there is snow. 

She dreams as Nile and of Nile simultaneously, bundled up in a thick coat and laughing as she throws a snowball at Andromache. 

Andromache dodges easily and throws one back, the projectile hitting its mark and bursting across Nile’s chest. The girl laughs, happy, and then waves Andromache closer. 

Andromache goes, a confident swagger to her steps even as she walks across the shifting snow and ice, unafraid to approach her assailant. 

Nile suggests they team up against “the boys,” and they do so, raining hard packed snow down on them from afar and ducking behind trees when Joe and Nicky begin to throw some back in their direction. 

Quynh wakes up with the echo of joy in her heart, with Andromache’s smile behind her eyes, and she feels a deep emptiness inside of her that seems to absorb any attempt at feeling she makes. 

She looks over at Booker. He is awake and using the laptop he bought a couple of towns back. “I want a phone.” 

He glances over at her, a furrow in his brow. “Why?”

She shrugs delicately. “To listen to music. To research. The phone has everything. I want one.” 

“You can borrow mine,” he points out, but it sounds less like an argument than a token protest. 

“I can,” she agrees. “But I want one for myself.” 

He closes the laptop and puts it away in a bag. Then he pulls on socks and shrugs on a leather jacket, tossing her red coat over to her. “Alright. Let’s go get one. Just a burner, though; anything else is too easy to track.” 

She only sort of knows what that means. In this matter, she will trust him. 

It is getting easier to do so. 

Quynh contemplates stabbing him just to prove to herself how easy it still is. 

She decides not to. He’ll complain for hours if she ruins another of his shirts, and then he’ll be distracted from showing her how to buy a “burner” phone. 

“Explain,” she commands. 

He huffs, a noise she is becoming accustomed to hearing. “Okay. But we’re stopping for coffee first. There’s a Starbucks down the street.” 

She frowns. She hates Starbucks and the names of the drinks that are in a language she wants to avoid entirely. But she does not think this is the time to put up a fight. 

“Fine.” 

Booker offers her a rare smile and holds the door open for her when they leave. 

She still feels… nothing. 

* * *

Nile tries not to look at the Welcome To signs outside of towns when she can help it, tries not to pay any attention when they cross state lines. 

She’s not sure how well she’s doing, not sure how much any of it helps. 

It only took a few days to convince them to put her in the driving rotation, and only a couple more for her to admit she hates driving in snow. They pull her back out, but they’re all exhausted and gross from days of living in a car, so they stop at a generic hotel chain--Nile tries not to even look at the sign, but she sees that it’s lit up red in the reflection on the ground. 

They spend two days there as the snow intensifies, and she drags them out to play in it at one point. The parking lot is covered in a blanket of white that leads straight out into the trees behind the long building. Nile has more fun than she thinks she’s had since she first died, goading the others into a snowball fight with her. 

She sees a light in Nicky’s eyes and a bright grin on Joe’s face that have been absent since… well, since she’s known them probably, but definitely since they’ve been on the run once more. 

Andy doesn’t climb far enough out of her grief-stricken guilt to be happy, but she looks at them all with love in her eyes as they giggle and shove snow down each other’s shirts. 

That’s enough for Nile. She exchanges a look with Joe that tells her he agrees; it’s enough for him and Nicky too. 

But when the snow is cleared, they’re back on the road. 

Nile wonders how much of her life is going to be spent running. The offer to let them leave her behind keeps cropping up in her thoughts; she would love to simply  _ rest.  _ The stress is incomparable to any she’s experienced, the hypervigilance that tells her she might be watched at every moment. The inability to trust her own mind, her own senses, because they might put her in danger if she looks or listens at the wrong time. 

She’s been in the Marines, and this is somehow worse. Or equally bad? She can’t really tell, but it shouldn’t be a contest, nothing should have to rank with the constant fear of death. 

The fear of an eternity tortured is equally bad. So bad that she’d almost rather give herself over and hope Quynh takes mercy on her instead. 

But then Nicky will bring her tea from a local shop he found in a small town. He’s learned that chai is her favorite, but he changes it up sometimes anyway to keep her on her toes. The rare times he chooses something she hates enough that she won’t drink it, he finishes it off and trades her his plain black tea instead. He drinks his basic but so sweet that it would rot her teeth if they could actually still be damaged by such things as too much sugar. Infinitely preferable, though, to things like white tea with jasmine--yuck. Nicky has no such qualms; if there’s a tea he won’t drink, she hasn’t found it yet, even if he chooses the most basic blends for himself without fail. 

And then Joe buys her a sword. She doesn’t even know where he finds it, it just shows up next to her thinks one morning and he tells her that they’ll start practicing in empty fields in between destinations, snow or not. He teaches her to hold it correctly, to swing, to block, and finally to fight in the days that pass as they loop what she tries not to know is the rural northeast. 

And Andy. Nile knows she has heart eyes when she looks at Andy, but it’s not romantic love. 

Nile isn’t sure she knows how to feel romantic love. It’s never really been something she cared about or had time for. 

But this definitely isn’t that. This is admiration and respect and something closer to idolization than she’d let on. 

Andy is the single most badass woman Nile has ever met, and she wants to learn everything from her that she can. Knowing that she has limited time makes every moment that much more important. 

So she won’t leave them; she can’t. She just prays that nothing she sees gives them away, because she doesn’t know how to live with herself if it ends up being her fault that something happens to them. 

* * *

Booker has been driving overnight, because their sleep has been erratic at best, Quynh seeking more dreams to give them clues and Booker having nightmares with every mile that brings him closer to the others. To his family. To whatever Quynh might do when she finds them.

Quynh is asleep in the passenger seat. Or, she  _ was;  _ she wakes silently and reaches out like a rattlesnake--quick and deadly, her fingers curling around Booker’s arm and tugging at him. 

He curses and quickly lets go of the steering wheel with his right hand, giving her the arm and straightening out the car with his left. “Don’t  _ do  _ that!” he snaps. 

“15 miles to Worcester,” she says. 

“What?” He looks around for a sign, but they’ve just entered Massachusetts from the south; Worcester is way more than 15 miles away. 

“I saw it.” 

It takes all his control not to slam on the brakes immediately. 

Fuck, that’s  _ close.  _ Too close. 

“What else did you see?” he asks, hands tight on the wheel. He doesn’t know if he wants them to catch up. He doesn’t think Quynh’s ready. 

He surely isn’t. 

She rattles off a list of routes and places. When he glances over, she’s already pulling up a map on her phone--fuck, he regrets that purchase even more now. 

She picks a destination and calculates the route. The GPS begins to speak in a robotic tone. 

Booker reminds himself to breathe. 

He cannot crash this car, because he will live, and Quynh will live, and anyone else might die. He will not be responsible for that. 

The GPS tells him to take the next exit. 

He does. 

It takes less than an hour to get to the place Quynh saw. She recognizes it immediately. 

“Opposite side of the road.” 

He takes an exit and loops to the opposite side. 

They have to be close, now. They drive until Booker hits his eight hour limit, and then he convinces Quynh it’ll be okay to stop. They park at a hotel and he gets a key for a room. 

When he makes it back to the car, Quynh is gone. 

He curses, kicks a tire, and sits down on the edge of the sidewalk, elbows braced on his knees and his head in his hands. His ass is firmly planted in leftover snow and slush. He can’t bring himself to give a shit. 

He’s so fucking screwed. 


	6. Chapter 6

When either Nicky or Joe go out and leave Nile and Andy behind in the room, they try to make sure the other stays behind as well. 

Andy can take care of herself from anything she sees coming, but out of the three of them that Quynh is after, she’s in the most danger. Nile has  _ felt  _ that, the way Quynh’s rage is fixated with Andy as its target. 

They haven’t caught a glimpse of how close Booker and Quynh have come, though. Nile sees only them driving through snow-covered landscapes, often barren of trees, or Booker asleep while Quynh tries not to sleep and watches late night television instead. 

Nile does not speak of how Quynh feels in these dreams. Nicky knows better than to ask, and Joe and Andy know better than to think they want the answer. 

So when Nicky is the first to wake, he slips free of Joe’s arms and presses a kiss to the top of Joe’s curls, murmuring “ _ cuore mio _ ” against Joe’s forehead as he pulls away. 

Joe blinks his beautiful eyes open to offer Nicky a small smile and murmur back, “ _ Stai attento. _ _ ”  _

Nicky nods. He offers Joe a smile that is for his heart and his heart alone, and then he changes into clothes for the day, heading out to collect breakfast and coffee for the others. 

The air is crisp and clean when he steps outside. It smells of  _ cold  _ in a way Nicky will never become accustomed to, no matter how many winters he spends in such a place. 

He walks carefully, trying not to draw attention as well as trying not to slip on the patches of ice that cover sections of the sidewalk every few meters. 

The café is just a short walk away, only a few blocks from their hotel. Even walking slowly, it does not take him long to reach it. It takes even less time to buy pre-made breakfasts: frozen sandwiches that get heated in industrial ovens, as well as muffins and croissants that come from plastic packages. He misses Italy, misses towns where you can still enter a _pasticceria_ and buy freshly baked foods. 

There are places, he knows, that do so here as well. But for now, this breakfast will have to do. 

He makes his way back out onto the street, head down to check for patches of ice on the sidewalk as he retraces his steps. It is only as he steps into the parking lot and sees a figure sitting on the curb that he hesitates. He opens his mouth to call out when the figure looks up, and then Nicky freezes, the air stolen from his lungs. 

His coffee spills upon the ground, melting the ice and snow, and all hell breaks loose. 

* * *

Quynh is sitting in the car when she sees a man leave the building off to the left. She looks, because she leaves no potential threat unassessed, and for a moment the breath is stolen from her lungs in a way that is too reminiscent of the water and pressure and  _ drowning.  _

She blinks back to the present and the man is already making his way down the sidewalk. She quickly steps out of the car, shutting the door quietly, and follows him. 

She pulls up the hood of her jacket. It’s not the red one she’s so used to wearing, and she’s grateful that she made a different choice today. The black is much less noticeable. She also cut her hair short after a style she found in a magazine, anything to look different than the woman they would be expecting. There is not much else about herself she can change, but she hopes it will be just enough enough to allow her to go unnoticed. 

And it is. He walks into a shop and she lingers in the entryway of the shop next to it; she ignores the smell of food and coffee because she does not need it. Not now. Not when she is so close to what has been fueling her across the many continents and miles she has traversed since she awoke on the coast of France. 

She will follow Nicolo back to the others, and then she will take them  _ all.  _

She is a wild thing, ruthless and unstoppable. They have no hope to match her. 

Although Nicolo is walking ahead of her as they approach the parking lot of the lodgings once more, Quynh is the first to see Booker. 

The foolish man is sitting on the curb next to the car where she left it. She knows the moment Nicolo notices him, because he drops the coffee and opens his mouth—she can see in profile as he takes in a breath to say something.

She runs, fleet-footed as a fox over the snow and ice, and buries a knife where his neck meets his shoulders, severing his spinal cord. As he falls, she wraps an arm around his waist and slashes his throat. He chokes on the air he’d inhaled to yell and dies gurgling instead, blood bubbling at the corners of his lips.

She drops him to the ground and looks up at Booker, who ran over as she jumped Nicolo. “Help me get him to the car.”

He opens his mouth but does not make any sound. After a moment, he nods and reaches down to lift up Nicolo’s body. She follows closely, ready to slit his throat again if he wakes.

He does. Just as they get to the car, Nicolo gasps, and she slices his throat again.

They have zip ties; she found them on Google and insisted they procure some, just in case. While Booker holds Nicky, she secures his hands behind him. Then she stuffs a ripped-up piece of shirt into his mouth and tapes over it—she did not learn this online, but from one of the strange stories on the television one night after Booker fell asleep. It gave her  _ many  _ ideas.

Nicolo awakens and kicks out, but she pins him easily and slits his throat once more before securing his ankles as well.

A foolish oversight. She will be more cautious. He is not her match; the centuries he has been walking this earth while she was buried underneath the sea are not long enough to have given him an edge with anything except new weapons. Even then, Booker has been teaching her to shoot a variety of guns.

But that does not mean she should underestimate Nicolo. Their gift--their curse--has always chosen skilled fighters, and Nicolo is no exception. He has always been a valuable ally in a fight; now that he is her enemy, she must remember to be wary of his skill. 

Booker shoves a cloth at her, the other part of the ripped-up shirt, now wet. “Clean up your hands,” he says roughly. “There’s blood on them.”

She does as he says and then digs out a fresh set of clothes to change into. For the second time she is grateful that she wasn’t wearing her favorite red coat; it’s light red enough that Nicky’s blood would have stained it. One or two washes might fix this one though--machines that wash clothes are a kind of science she has researched and tentatively understands, but that does not make them any less a miracle in her eyes.

She hands Booker a clean shirt, too, as his was stained by carrying Nicolo's body.

“We need to go.”

He laughs, a broken sound. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Get in the car.”

He strips out of his shirt, uncaring of the cold air, and tugs on the new one before he joins her. The warmth from their earlier drive still lingers, the seats not cold from sitting empty quite yet.

It has not been very long, and yet everything has changed.

She glances at their captive in the backseat, now awake and staring at her with impassive eyes.

“Good thing the windows are tinted,” Booker mutters. He puts the car into reverse, pulls out carefully, and gets them on the road to anywhere but here.

* * *

Joe wakes up to the sound of his name. He pushes himself up on his arms, looking over at Nile and Andy with sleep-heavy eyes. “What is it?”

“Where’s Nicky?”

Joe frowns. “He went to get breakfast.” 

“When?” Andy asks. 

He looks at the sunlight spilling through the curtains and frowns. “How long have you been awake?”

The set of Andy’s jaw speaks the answer just as loudly as any words could hope to.  _ Too long.  _

“I’ll go look for him,” Nile says. Joe wants to argue, but she’s already dressed. Before he can tell her to wait, that they will all go, she’s out the door. 

He pushes himself upright until he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, face in his hands. “Andy,” he says, but then he finds he has no more words. 

“He’s fine.” She doesn’t say it like a promise; she says it like a fact. Like anything else would be unacceptable. 

Before he can call her on that, Nile bangs back into the room. Joe looks up, startled by the noise, heart hammering in his chest. 

She looks panicked. She grabs Andy and drags her outside. 

Joe follows, wearing only a thin shirt and sleep pants, feet bare against the cold ground. 

There is spilled food in the snow, soggy takeaway bags and coffee leaking from an overturned paper cup. 

There is blood, bright red against the snow. 

So  _ much  _ blood. 

Joe sees red. 

Before he can move, Andy is in front of him, hands on either side of his head framing his face. Her nails dig into his skull, pinpricks of pain that fight to ground him against the raging hurricane of his emotions. “Don’t,” she says. “I need you to keep it together.” 

Some distant part of Joe understands what she means. He has been trying, so hard, to step into the spaces Booker and Quynh left behind at Andy’s shoulder. He has been trying to support the team, and right now that is more important than ever. Andy is mortal and Nile is too young, and Nicky is  _ gone-- _

Nicky is gone. 

That’s always going to be Joe’s priority. Nothing,  _ no one _ will ever change that. “I can’t,” he says, and it comes out ragged. “Andy--”

“I need you,” she repeats, shaking him a little. “Yusuf. We will not leave him. But I need you to be thinking with a clear head.” 

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know if it is a disagreement or an attempt to clear it. Both, maybe. 

Andy lets him go. She steps back and eyes him coolly. 

Nile links her arm with Joe’s and tugs him back inside the room. He follows because it’s easier than fighting. 

She pushes him until he’s sitting on the bed, the same position he’d been in minutes before. She sits across from him and says, “Breathe with me.”

He wants to scoff. But he can humor her. She takes in a deep breath, and he echoes the motion. She follows her exaggerated breaths until he feels some of the clarity restored to his mind, and then he nods once to let her know that he’s done. 

He looks up at Andy. “Can we track his phone?”

“On it.” 

Nile comes to sit next to him on the bed, gently prying his balled up fists apart. There are little crescent cuts where his nails have dug into his palms without him even noticing. She laces their fingers together instead. “We’ll get him back,” she says with conviction. “Whatever it takes.” 

Joe hopes she’s right. He does not often pray, but right now he prays that Quynh’s plans are anything short of enacting on them what was done to her. Anything else, he can… well, not live with. But as long as he can get Nicky back, he  _ will  _ live with it. 

An eternity separated from his heart, though? 

He does not know how Andy has done it. He does not think he is as strong as she is. He knows he could not survive it.

“Whatever it takes,” Nile repeats, and he realizes he’s squeezing her hand so tight that the bones might be broken. She doesn’t even flinch. 

“Okay,” he agrees, and he tries to take comfort in the promise. 

“They’re moving west,” Andy says. 

Joe lets go of Nile’s hand and stands, beginning to shove both his and Nicky’s things into their bags indiscriminately. The women join his efforts. 

_ I’m coming,  _ he promises Nicky silently.  _ Amore mio _ _ , I am coming.  _

* * *

Booker will not look in the backseat at Nicky. He avoids the rearview mirror; it’s not necessary. He drives just as well without it.

Quynh puts on Bohemian Rhapsody.

Booker thinks,  _ I was right about this song all along. It sucks. _

He feels Nicky’s eyes fixated on the back of his head as he drives, never glancing away even as Quynh sings along and directs him via the GPS on her phone.

Where on Earth she could be guiding them, he doesn’t know. She’s learned too fast; she must have been watching him when he wasn’t paying close enough attention. Fuck.

This is all his fault. This is all  _ his  _ goddamn fault.

A few hours down the road, she takes a phone out of her pocket and throws it out the window. Nicky’s phone. When he glances at her, askance, she says, “I want them to find us, but not right away.” 

He nods. It makes too much sense. “Where are we going?” 

She taps the side of her head, but that’s the only response he gets. Right. Nile, dreams. He notices she keeps the phone screen on Spotify rather than the GPS directions.  _ Of course.  _

“Can we change the song?” he asks, because he’s worn thin and cannot handle this one extra irritation. 

She puts on a playlist that, when he glances over, is titled  _ 200 Sad Country Songs _ . This means that at some point, she actively searched out the genre of music that most annoyed people and has been waiting for this. 

He snorts an involuntary laugh. Joke’s on her; he doesn’t mind sad country music. In fact, right now it feels like the only thing he can handle. It quiets his mind and allows him to go on autopilot, following directions and not thinking twice about anything. 

Or maybe  _ that  _ was her intent all along. 

He can’t claim to know what she’s thinking. She changes every day; he never knows what each new morning will bring. 

Today, it brings them a remote cabin in Vermont. “Where did you find this?” he asks, not expecting an answer. 

True to form, she just unbuckles her seatbelt and gets out of the car, reaching into the backseat to drag Nicky out and dump him on the ground. 

Booker has the absurd thought that maybe she’ll just leave him there. Nicky would get free eventually. 

But no, of course not. She looks up at him, eyebrows raised and silently asking,  _ what are you waiting for?  _

He sighs, hoping it comes out more aggrieved than heartbroken, and climbs out of the car too. He picks Nicky up, his brother a dead weight in his arms, not even attempting to struggle. That makes it so much worse; he knows Nicky is aware. His blue eyes stared up at them just moments ago, calculating as he looked between them. Figuring out their dynamic, then. Booker hopes it tells him something useful. 

He wishes Nicky would fight back. 

Quynh unlocks the door to the cabin and leads him inside. She goes straight to a door under the stairs that leads to what looks like unending darkness--a basement of some kind. She gestures for Booker to go down the stairs. 

He tries not to feel a prickle of unease as he does. 

He walks into the darkness and tries to think of a way to fix this. Distracted, he’s taken off guard when Nicky suddenly thrashes in his arms. He loses his grip and his footing, and the two of them go tumbling down into the dark. He hears a snap, feels a burst of pain, and then there’s nothing--blissful quiet that he welcomes as a few moments of respite from the fucked up mess he’s gotten himself into. 

* * *

Andy bites back a curse when the phone they’re tracking stops moving in the middle of a highway. It’s still for long enough that it’s more than a stop light, and then it suddenly cuts out as if the phone has been destroyed. 

Shit. 

She looks at Joe, who is sitting in the passenger seat and gripping the hand hold so tight it has to hurt. She meets Nile’s gaze in the rearview mirror and shakes her head. “It cut out. Phone was destroyed.” 

Joe goes frighteningly still. 

Nile bites her lip and then says, “Okay. Keep going to that point and then we can regroup.” 

“We’ll trade,” Andy tells her. “You nap. Maybe you’ll dream.” 

She hates that they’ve come to this point, but she’s had Copley tracking Booker, and he stopped using aliases she knew a week ago. He must be on to new ones now, and that makes him much harder to find. 

“Copley’s looking,” she tells Joe quietly. “And so are we. We’re not giving up.” 

Joe doesn’t respond. She knows it is taking all of his concentration to keep the destruction he wants to wreak on the world reigned in. 

She settles back into the seat and gives Nile the occasional direction to get them where they need to go. 

_ Quynh,  _ she thinks.  _ Don’t hurt Nicky for my mistakes. I’m coming. You can have me then.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations: 
> 
> cuore mio - my heart  
> stai attento - be careful  
> pasticceria - bakery  
> amore mio - my love


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: temporary death, blame, heavy subjects

_ What did you think I'd say to that? _

_ Does a scorpion sting when fighting back? _

_ They strike to kill, and you know I will _

_ You know I will _

(Mad Woman - Taylor Swift)

Quynh hears the loud thump of the two men hitting the bottom of the stairs. The distinct sound of snapping bones echoes up the stairs, and she thinks to herself, _I need a drink._

It sounds disturbingly like Booker’s voice. He’s a rotten influence. 

She does _not_ need a drink right now. No, right now she is close to what she wants, and she’s not going to waste a moment of it on something as silly as the lack of mental clarity alcohol causes. 

She does check the fridge, though, and is pleased when she finds a case of beer. Maybe that’ll prevent Booker from complaining about what she assumes, given that he hasn’t said anything, was a broken neck. 

She pulls one out and twists off the top, uncaring about the way it slices her palm open before it comes free. The cuts heal easily and she wipes them off on her black jeans before tossing the bottle cap in the garbage. 

She hears faint groaning from the direction of the basement and makes her way there, flicking on the light and descending the stairs. 

Booker is cursing quietly in French, and Nicolo’s eyes are narrowed as he glares at the man. 

“Hello Nicolo.” She offers the beer to Booker, who stumbles to his feet and snags it, rubbing at his neck with his free hand. 

Quynh leaves Nicolo on the floor for now, poking around the basement as she tries to figure out what’s here. She finds a chair and moves it to the middle of the room before picking Nicolo up from beneath his arms and dragging him over to it. “Sit.” 

Nicolo collapses into the chair. She tilts her head as she looks at him, taking in the changes since she last saw him in the flesh. Not in a dream, not in a memory, but since they shared the same air and were close enough to touch one another. 

His hair is shorter. His eyes are calmer. He seems settled. Stable. Sane, in a way that she envies. 

She holds on to that envy and lets it remind her of how much she _hates_ him for leaving her to suffer. 

She reaches out for the duct tape on his face. He does not flinch away from her, merely watches her with his placid blue eyes. When she rips the tape free, he moves only to spit off the wad of cloth. 

When he looks back up, he offers her a hesitant smile. “ _Mia bella sorella,”_ he says. 

She slits his throat before he can say anything else. How _dare_ he? 

Booker, off to the side, raises the bottle to his lips and drinks deep. 

She settles back onto her heels, waiting for Nicky to wake again. 

She has hours, even days, ahead of her. 

She can afford to take her time. 

* * *

Nile convinces them to stop for lunch, because they skipped breakfast and they’re reached the area where Nicky’s phone was destroyed, so they have no more leads. 

They stop at a diner, the kind of kitschy place Nile’s little brother would _love._ She must be exhausted because she almost takes a picture to show him the next time she sees him... before she remembers: that’s right, she won’t see him ever again. 

So she’s even more depressed now than she was ten minutes ago, which she wouldn’t have thought possible. 

Joe looks like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin; he is a gasket about to burst, the excess frantic energy leaking out of him in sharp gestures and constant motions. He can’t sit still; he shifts in his seat, taps his fingers against the table, clenches his hand around his coffee mug repeatedly--anything to let some of the building pressure inside of him out. 

Andy, by contrast, is determination personified. There is not much room for kindness in her when she is also hurting. Her only focus is getting Nicky back, and even keeping Joe together in the meantime appears to be a priority only so that she can advance that goal. 

Nicky is not here to be the one to look after everyone’s feelings. Someone has to, though, which means it’s probably up to Nile. 

But she’s been driving for hours across most of this long-ass state, and she’s exhausted, and she’s sad, too. 

She’s terrified that if she closes her eyes and dreams, she’ll see something terrible happening to someone she loves. As if she needed _more_ fodder for her nightmares. 

So they sit and pick at their food, people that are less humans than beings driven by waves of anger and dejection. 

Nile wonders if this is what they were like after they lost Quynh. Nicky’s only been gone for half a day, and already his absence is a gaping wound that can’t heal. 

Nile can grimly appreciate the poetry of this no matter how much she fucking hates it. Quynh took their heart just like they broke hers. Nile has felt it, the way Quynh’s rage has shifted from madness with a side of heartbreak to the opposite, heartbreak with a side of madness. 

It’s not a distinction she’s felt like discussing with the others; Andy carries the guilt with her every day already. It doesn’t make Quynh any less dangerous, and it isn’t something they can easily fix. 

Time is the only possible cure, but they’ve run out of that. 

Nile pushes her plate away and stands. “Come on. Let’s find somewhere to stay so I can get some fucking sleep.” 

All she has to offer is the potential that her dreams will bring her information. She can sacrifice a bit more of her peace of mind for Nicky. He’s worth all that and more. 

* * *

Booker leaves when Quynh is no longer paying him any attention. He hasn’t been paying much attention himself, but that doesn’t mean he wants to be anywhere near what’s going on in the basement. 

He’d kill Quynh if he thought it would help. Or, well, he’d try. But he knows he can’t match her in a fight; maybe if he hadn’t taught her to shoot, he’d stand a chance, but even then, Booker has seen Andy dodge and deflect bullets and he bets Quynh can do the same. 

No. The only help he can offer is this. 

He grabs another beer, goes out to the front porch, and listens to the quiet sound of wind rustling in the trees as he turns his phone over and over in his hands. 

He dials a number and lifts it to his ear as it rings. 

“How did you get this number?”

“Copley,” he says. “Trace this call. I don’t have coordinates, but this is our current location. If the others are searching, Nicky’s here, but I don’t know how long we’ll be sticking around.” 

There’s silence between them for long moments before Copley says, “Done.” 

“Thanks.” Booker goes to hang up, but Copley speaks again before he can pull the phone too far from his ear. 

“Be careful.” 

_As if anyone gives a fuck,_ Booker thinks. But he only says, “Sure. Thanks.” 

He crushes the phone under his boot after he hangs up the call. 

It’s all he can do. 

It has to be enough. It _has_ to. 

* * *

Nile settles down to sleep, ignoring the tension in the room between Joe and Andy. Joe won’t rest, is pacing back and forth across the room. Nile thinks the only reason he hasn’t punched a wall is because it might prevent her from sleeping. Even while emanating a restless energy that is so palpable that Nile can feel it as strongly as if it was her own, Joe knows that Nile’s dreams are the strongest lead they can get. He would not risk that just to vent his frustrations. 

Andy is angry. With herself, with Joe, with Booker and Quynh. Nile thinks Andy would be angry with her, too, if she could just figure out a reason why she should be. 

Instead, Andy sits next to where Nile is laying down in the hotel bed, curtains drawn against the light of the setting sun. Andy has a hand resting on top of Nile’s head; she doesn’t stroke over Nile’s hair or provide any other soothing gestures, but her presence is enough to make Nile feel grounded, to make her feel calm and safe. 

Nile falls asleep. 

At first, she dreams of nothing. But then: flashes. 

Nicky, his throat slit and blood mingling with spilled coffee in the snow. A car--and, more importantly, its license plate. Zip ties and duct tape. A cabin. A nondescript basement and a folding chair. _Nicky,_ speaking in Italian, and a blinding _rage_ before his throat gets slit once more. 

Nile gasps awake, hands going immediately to her own throat. She has nightmares about her first death even now, six months later, and she wonders if she’ll have those nightmares for the rest of her life. 

She wonders if they’ll be overshadowed now by nightmares of slitting Nicky’s throat instead--of _wanting_ to watch him choke on his own blood-- and she shudders. 

“Fuck,” she says, her voice wrecked. 

Joe is in front of her when she looks up. He hands her a glass of water and she drinks it gratefully, the liquid cool in her throat. She almost laughs when she thinks about the days when they wouldn’t dare give her water after a nightmare in case it was a dream of Quynh, endlessly drowning. 

It’s not funny, but it has to be. That’s the only way to cope. 

She hates that she longs for that, because as terrible as it was, those were simpler times. 

“Paper,” she says as she sets the cup aside. “And a pen.” 

Joe hands her his sketchbook and she finds a blank page, quickly drawing the letters and numbers of the license plate she’d seen. “This was the plate on the car.” 

Andy takes it from her and moves to a laptop, ready to track. Before she gets further than a few typed commands, her phone rings. 

She glances at the name and tosses it to Joe. “Copley,” she tells him, before going back to what she was doing. 

Joe’s expression is unreadable when he answers. It is far from the blankness of Andy holding back or the calm of Nicky’s resting state. Joe is so full of emotions that no single one can be discerned; he looks like the kind of chaos personified Nile has only felt in her early dreams of Quynh, driven mad with grief and betrayal. 

“Joe speaking,” he says as he answers the phone. He listens, and his face grows darker. He says nothing other than a clipped, “Understood,” in answer before he hangs up. He walks over to Andy and offers her the phone. 

“Well?” she asks. 

“Copley has a location.”

“How?” Nile can’t help but ask, because that seems too good to be true. 

“He says Booker called him. He traced the call.” 

That explains why Joe looks so fucking pissed, that singular expression winning out over any other emotions. “Why would he do that?”

“Doesn’t fucking matter,” Joe says. “Let’s go.” 

Nile is glad she got sleep while she did, even if it ended in an abrupt and terrible way. “I’ll drive.” She leaves no room for argument in her tone. 

She pulls her jeans and jacket back on and stuffs her feet into her combat boots, sitting down on the edge of the bed to lace them up. 

Joe stops next to her and reaches out, movement careful in a way none of his others have been. She pauses in tying her laces to look up at him, a question in the upward tilt of her eyebrows. “Thank you, Nile.” 

She smiles at him. It’s genuine, no need for awkward and forced reassurance here. There is only affection for this man and how passionately he loves his partner first and foremost, but his family as a close second place. “Always.” 

He leans over to press a kiss to her forehead before pulling back once more. He grabs some of their bags and says, “I’ll go start the car.” 

When he’s gone, Andy finishes packing up her own things and nods at Nile. “You good?”

“‘Course,” she replies. “Are you?”

“I will be when Nicky’s safe.” It’s an unexpected honesty. 

“Whatever it takes?” Nile asks. 

Andy makes a soft noise of agreement. “Something like that.” 

Nile will wonder later if maybe _this_ was the moment when she should have realized something was wrong. 

* * *

Quynh does not need to use weapons to hurt Nicolo. They are, in fact, not even a preferable method of torture. She wants to cause him lasting harm, and there are few ways at this stage in his life that he hasn’t been killed. 

Short of locking him up to die over and over for a few centuries in an echo of her own torment, nothing she does can come close to causing him the same pain she has felt. 

But if death and injuries could do the trick, Nicolo di Genova would not be the man he is. He and Yusuf killed each other so many times, in increasingly intimate and painful ways, over their first few decades together. Pain was their first love language, and while she does not believe him so twisted as to enjoy being tortured, she knows he is more resilient than most. 

The best way to torture Nicolo is to hurt Yusuf, especially in front of him, especially when he can do nothing to stop it. 

By taking Nicolo, she is already torturing Yusuf in the same fashion. She knows his mind will be conjuring images of all of the harms he could prevent from befalling his beloved; she takes enough satisfaction in that. 

Not enough to leave Nicolo be. Not entirely. 

No. She knows the way to hurt Nicolo is not with fists or blades. It is with words, just as it always has been. 

He is watching her with calm eyes, unafraid. Quynh is not sure if this lack of fear is because he trusts her still or because he simply does not think she can harm him. Either way, she plans to prove him wrong. 

“Do you know how many times I died?” 

He shakes his head. He is not afraid, but he is hesitant to speak, it appears. This might be because she has quickly killed him every time he has tried. 

“I did the math.” 

He has the audacity to laugh, just a bit, and she knows him well enough to read the words behind the sound. The unspoken “ _of course you did,”_ because she has always been good at math. 

She and Yusuf spent more than a few years at places of learning in the Middle East, once he had taught her enough Arabic that she was more than simply conversant. Nicolo and Andromache, bored by such pursuits and trusting them to impart whatever they deemed important from what they learned, ran off to drink their way across the Silk Road and bring back expensive presents from far away. 

Yusuf and Quynh spent years even after they moved on continuing to discuss theories of philosophy and mathematics as well as poetry and languages. The former two, more than the latter, were subjects in which Nicolo and Andromache had little interest for varying reasons. Nicolo always had his faith, which (for him) answered many of the questions they liked to debate in philosophy. 

(Yusuf, too, had his faith, of course, but it gave him more room for questions about the world around him, a flexibility that benefited his curious nature.)

Andromache had simply lived so long that she felt she had all the answers she needed about the world and the people in it. 

Quynh hates that Nicolo knows her so well. Hates that for all she has been through, she has changed so little that he knows her still. 

“Approximately,” she continues, trying to keep her voice even. Some of the anger leaks through, and his smile drops again. _Good._ “Millions of times, Nicolo.”

“ _Mi dispiace,”_ he murmurs. He bows his head, but she reaches out to tilt his chin back up, forcing him to look her in the eye. 

He meets her gaze steadily, but there is pain now in his eyes. 

“You left me there.” 

“Yes.” She respects, at least, that he does not try to deny it. But that is a pinprick of warmth compared to the flood of resentment she feels. 

“I didn’t know you gave up,” she tells him. “Not at first. I died, over and over, and I was in _agony_ every moment. For centuries, Nicolo, I knew nothing but pain and death. I liked it when I died. It was peaceful then. But I always came back just to drown once more. Can you imagine it?”

“No.” 

“But each time I died, the peace was shorter. I came back faster, just to die all over again. That’s where the math becomes impossible, Nicolo. It takes a certain amount of time to drown, yes, but to regenerate? No one knows. I could only tell when the water I breathed in was still warm from my throat that I was coming back more quickly.”

She blinks and the haze of memory recedes enough that she sees him once more. There are tears in his eyes, but he has not tried to look away from her again. 

She takes a deep breath. It is shaky on the inhale, but steady when she lets it out once more. “But through all of that, I thought that you would find me. That you would never leave me to die like that for eternity.” 

“Quynh,” he says, and on his lips, her name sounds like a prayer to his God. 

“Why did you leave me, Nicolo?”

When he drops his gaze and bows his head to cry, she feels each drop like rain falling onto the fires of fury inside of her. Not enough to quench the flames, but it feels good nonetheless. 

If the best she can do to hurt him is make him understand the depth of his betrayal, well. It’s not as if that isn’t something she thinks about constantly anyway. 

Nicolo has always prompted them to share their burdens to ease the load. This one, she hopes, will weigh on him as heavily as the burden the Greeks believed Atlas bore. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations:
> 
> mi dispiace - I'm sorry


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! (For now!) Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I really hope you enjoyed this fic. As you can tell from the fact that it's already marked as a series, this is the end of this one, but not the end of the story. The sequel is already in the works, although I have another fic that's likely to come out before then and a WIP already ongoing. So... soon, but not immediately.

_ You see, I’ve got a bullet for a tooth _

_ And I’m gonna use it to shoot you _

_ Even though you’ve got a gun to my head _

_ You’re gonna be the one that winds up dead _

(Baby Outlaw - Elle King)

Her words echo in his ears, over and over again. Quynh does not speak into the silence, allowing his ragged breaths, just short of sobs, to be the only sound that fills the room. There is nothing to distract his mind from repeating what she last said again and again, although it gets caught on the least important of the words. 

_ Why  _ is a question he could have expected. He even has an answer, flimsy though it looks when it is no longer in the shadow of their hearts, but is instead illuminated by the reality of her suffering. 

They stopped looking because they lost more and more of Andy every day. She became reckless, beyond suicidal; she risked not only her life but her safety as she sought out dangers that were not so easily recovered from. 

She drowned over a dozen times in their search, and they almost lost her to the seas in countless storms after she insisted they search in spite of dangerous conditions. Neither Joe nor Nicky had the heart to deny her for decades on end; what would they not do, if it was for Quynh? 

The answer, they eventually realized, was that they could not sacrifice themselves beyond repair. They would not lose Andromache to the sea as they had lost Quynh. And they would not risk each other. 

When they called off the search, Andy raged with a fury the like of which they had never seen. She searched without them for long years, and they slept uneasily at night, wondering if they had lost both sisters and not just one. 

When she found them again, she was hollow. The light that drove her seemed to have been extinguished. Only in the centuries that followed could they coax the embers that remained back into a glow that might keep her going. 

It was nothing compared to the zeal she had once had for life, for love, for helping others. When she looked at them together, it was with a pain they could scarcely imagine. 

Booker, for all his sins, helped Andy more than they ever had. He did not bring back all of her light, but as he liked to say, “Misery loves company.” Andy had someone who could understand her on a level Joe and Nicky could not; for all they had lost, she had lost so much it nearly consumed her in her grief. 

Only Booker could relate to that feeling. 

Even if he bore it with less grace. 

But now, looking at Quynh, Nicky realizes that for all the impossible hurt that Andy survived, Quynh survived  _ worse.  _

She did not lose  _ almost  _ everything. 

She  _ lost  _ everything, dying in agony, until it warped her into something almost unknowable. Until nothing she loved was sacred any longer. 

All of this is encompassed in her question:  _ Why?  _

And for all of the feelings he has about that, this is not the part of her words that his mind is stuck on. 

No, instead, his breath hitches each time his mind replays  _ Nicolo  _ in her voice. 

She says it perfectly after centuries of practice. She says it with an anguish that tells him the depth of the betrayal she feels is beyond any words she can say. She says it like he is still her little brother, and that is what hits him with the weight of all he has done, all he has lost. 

“We thought it was the choice we could live with,” he tells her finally, when the silence gets to be too much for him to bear. When he is desperate to hear her say anything at all, even if those words continue to disembowel him more effectively than knives ever could. 

“I didn’t know you had given up on me,” she tells him. “Not for a million lifetimes. Not until I began to dream.”

He can imagine it so clearly. Quynh, in purgatory, knowing with a surety that ran bone-deep that they would come free her. Quynh, seeing them with Booker, more and more as time went on, realizing that they had given her up. 

“Did it get easier?” she asks. “Missing me? Did you stop noticing the empty space that was left behind?”

He wants to tell her that no, it didn’t. But that would be a lie. 

Time heals all wounds, and losing her was no exception. It never faded entirely; it left a scar on them in a way little else could. But days went by where he no longer thought of her. After a couple of centuries--after Booker--he could look at Andy and not even think about Quynh’s absence from her side. 

“I have always loved you,” he tells her instead. “Every moment.” 

“Your love is weak.” She doesn’t say it with the venom he would expect from such words. She states it as a fact. 

“Yes,” he agrees, because any love that allowed him to decide his sister’s eternal agony was acceptable must be weak. “ _ Mi dispiace, _ _ ”  _ he repeats, and then he truly gives in to the tears. He murmurs the words over and over, expecting no absolution but tethering himself to the recitation of them in an act of contrition no less sincere than those he offers to God. 

She does not kill him this time. She simply watches him cry and smiles, an almost gentle expression on her face. 

“I do not forgive you,” she tells him every time he stops to heave air into his chest after too many rapid sobs. “And you will never forgive yourself.” 

* * *

Joe understands why Nile should drive. He also understands that he is far from his most rational at the moment, only able to focus on the fact that Nicky has been taken from him and he will stop at nothing to get him back. 

He wishes he was driving, though, because Nile goes ten over the speed limit where he would go twenty and slows to take corners instead of just speeding through them. 

His grip on the safety bar is the only thing keeping him from slamming a fist into the dashboard and demanding that she go faster. 

That and the knowledge that Andy might genuinely kill him if he lost even a modicum of his control. 

He’d come back, but he doesn’t want to lose precious moments of focus now. Doesn’t want to risk something happening that he should have been here to protect them from. 

Even distracted, he can take bullets for Andy and fight with a skill born from more years of experience than Nile can currently quantify. 

The GPS tells them that they are fifteen minutes away from their destination. If Joe was driving, they could make that in under ten. 

But Nile  _ slows.  _

“We need a plan,” she says. 

Joe’s teeth grind against one another. 

Andy reaches forward and squeezes his shoulder. “Don’t face Quynh alone if you can help it. Prioritize extracting Nicky. Quynh can outfight both of you. Getting away has to be the goal.” 

Nile looks unhappy with this, a plan that is less a strategy and more a statement of goals, but she nods. Andy squeezes Joe’s shoulder once more and he realizes that she’s waiting for him to agree, too. 

“Got it,” he promises. The plan, boiled down to essential elements, is to  _ get Nicky back.  _

It’s the only plan Joe could possibly follow in this scenario. 

When they pull up in front of the house, Nile turns off the car and turns out the lights. Andy passes her a gun; Joe already has one, along with his sword. They all climb silently from the car, leaving the doors open rather than risk making a noise by closing them. 

Booker appears in the doorway of the cabin, backlit from the lights inside. 

He raises a gun and aims it at Joe. 

He hesitates. 

Joe does not. Before Booker can decide if he’s going to pull the trigger, Joe shoots him in the head.

And then a few more times, emptying a clip into Booker’s body as he goes down.

It feels like a Band-Aid on a knife wound. But even still, that tiny bit helps.

Joe takes point, because Andy always cedes that right when Nicky is involved. He makes his way into the house, kicking Booker’s lifeless body as he steps over him and makes his way inside. He tries not to make any unnecessary sound otherwise; the gunshots were silenced, so if he’s quiet enough, he might start off with the upper hand.

The door to the basement is open, tucked underneath the stairs and visible from the entryway. Joe only manages to go down them quietly because he keeps his mind focused on sparing Nicky pain.

It’s a pointless endeavor. He reaches the bottom of the stairs in time to see Quynh thrust a katana through Nicky’s heart. 

The sound that leaves his lips is pure fury and pain, but Quynh is already turning on him with a smile and a blade wet with Nicky’s blood. “Yusuf,” she greets, a smile on her face that doesn’t reach her eyes. “It’s nice to see you.”

He shoots her, and she slices across his abdomen. They both fall to the ground, dying within inches of one another. “Why?” he asks.

“Because it is what you deserve,” she tells him, and she dies with a smile on her lips.

This time, it reaches her eyes, and that lingers even as life fades from them. Moments later, he follows her into the darkness.

* * *

Andy makes it down the stairs second, Nile close at her back. She is just in time to see Joe die. 

She doesn’t know exactly how long Quynh has been out, and more importantly, she doesn’t know how long it will take for her to revive. It’s more of an art than a science, no matter what people like Merrick and Dr. Kozac think. 

“Cover me,” she tells Nile as she tucks her gun into the back pocket of her jeans, barely remembering to flick the safety on as she does so. 

She pulls a knife out of her boot and slices through the ties binding Nicky, cradling his face before he can slump to the ground. “Wake up,” she whispers, stroking over his cheeks with gentle thumbs. “Come on, Nicky.”

He comes awake silently, eyes opening and immediately aware. His hands come up to wrap around her wrists and he squeezes once, gently, to let her know that he’s alright. 

She lets him go and stands, pulling her gun free once more. She hands it to him along with extra clips of ammo; she can easily manage with just her labrys for this fight. 

Quynh comes to before Joe. Andy doesn’t know how long she plays dead; all she knows is that suddenly, Quynh is up and shooting Nile between the eyes. 

_ Booker,  _ Andy thinks with exasperation. Of course he would have taught Quynh how to shoot. 

Andy and Nicky flank each other and get ready to fight. Quynh, a pit viper who cannot die. Nicky, who cannot match her, and Nile, who shouldn’t even try. 

Andy. Who maybe could, if she were still immortal. 

Who maybe could, if she even wanted to. 

Faced with the reality of Quynh, though, she knows immediately that she doesn’t want to do this. 

She wants her family to be safe. That will never change. But if she survived Booker’s betrayal and Merrick’s labs only to die here, at Quynh’s hand… well, at least she saw the other half of her soul once more. 

Quynh attacks. They fight. And Andy tries her best not to die, because if she is meant to die here, then she will be grateful for the many fights she has lived through up to this point. But she hopes that she does not, because she would like to spend more than her last minutes with Quynh. 

She wants days, weeks, even years. Quynh, alive and whole and free, is a gift Andy could never have asked for. Asking for more than simply time spent in her presence would be unreasonable. So Andy wishes for that: time, spent in whatever kind of agony Quynh has planned for her, because nothing can match the pain of their separation, of the guilt she has carried with her every moment of every day since she gave up the search for the love of her life. 

She put herself, and their family, first. 

No longer. 

Her last days are for Quynh. It’s all she has left to offer. Maybe, if she’s lucky, it will be enough. 

* * *

When Joe comes to, Nicky has joined the fight. He has a gun that he must have gotten from Andy or Nile, and he looks beautiful even in torn and bloodstained clothes. Joe wishes he had thought to grab Nicky’s sword, because if he has to die, then his favorite sight to wake up to is Nicky wielding his sword and fighting off anyone who wants to hurt them.

Joe pushes himself to his feet with a groan and snatches up his dropped weapons. He leaps into the fray, guarding Nicky’s back and trying to keep Quynh away from Nile and Andy. 

It’s a losing battle. But, in his many years on this Earth, Joe has faced worse odds. 

He has faith in his family. They will get through this as they always do. They are all warriors at heart; they can do nothing else but give every fight all that they have. 

It has to be enough. 

* * *

“Stop!” Booker shouts, thundering down the stairs. Putting the six of them in one basement is a recipe for nothing but enough blood they could drown in it; he’s surprised that the layer of blood on the floor hasn’t covered every inch yet.

That’s not the blood he cares about, though. The blood he cares about is that which is about to be spilled from the knife Quynh has to Andy’s throat. There’s a trickle of blood already trailing its way down Andy’s neck, and Booker has to resist the urge to try to bodily drag Quynh away from his best friend.

“Why?” Quynh asks. She sounds nothing but curious; not angry, not betrayed, not confused.

If all that Booker has earned in his weeks by her side is that she stops long enough to listen to him in this moment, it will have been worth it.

“She’s mortal,” he says quickly, remembering the last time he had to say something similar. That time, it was a desperate bid for a man with too much money and too little empathy to leave her be. In this moment, the stakes feel even steeper. “If you kill her, that’s it. She won’t come back.”

He’s banking on Quynh’s hate as much as any love for Andy that may be left within her. If she kills Andy, she can never get her back, but more than that, she can never make her  _ suffer. _

__

Booker is, at his core, a selfish man. He would trade Andy’s suffering for a chance at keeping her alive every time. He loves her too much to let her die like this.

He hates himself. But when Andy meets his gaze, he sees nothing but absolution in her eyes. She knows this about him, and she loves him still.

He wants to beg Quynh, but he knows it will do nothing. If anything, it may annoy her into making a snap decision. So he waits.

Quynh lowers the knife until it is pressed against Andy’s stomach, a quiet threat. “What would you have me do?” she asks. The question is clearly for Booker, but Andy doesn’t give him a chance to respond.

“If you leave the others, I won’t fight. You can take me anywhere you like, so long as it’s just the two of us.”

A choked noise of protest echoes in the air, and it takes Booker a moment to realize it came from  _ him.  _ “Andy—” he starts to argue, but she cuts him off with nothing more than a silent warning in her narrow-eyed gaze.

Quynh steps back. “Your word means little to me, Andromache.”

“I know.”

Quynh nods once. She turns and Booker barely realizes she has thrown the knife at him instead before it is suddenly buried in his chest. He stumbles back a few steps and hits the wall, sinking slowly until he is sitting against it. “Quynh,” he says, but he has no words to follow the plea.

“Thank you for your help,” she tells him. “Goodbye, Booker.”

He tries to hold his eyes open long enough to watch them pass, but Quynh’s aim was perfect and he’s dead before he can even hear the last syllable of his name.

* * *

Booker wakes up on the blood-soaked basement floor, and Andy’s voice is the first thing he hears. When he opens his eyes, though, he realizes it’s nothing more than a memory. Andy and Quynh are gone. 

“ _ I won’t see you again,”  _ he had said to her that day on the beach. Less than a year ago, even if it feels like a lifetime has passed.

“ _ Have a little faith, Book,”  _ she had told him in return. These are the words that echo in his ears now, the words she had chosen instead of a permanent goodbye.

Faith. He didn’t know how to have that.

She had been right, though, and he wants to hate her for it. He wishes she was here so he could shake her and repeat back to her the same thing she had told him when he made the worst mistake of his life:  _ not like this. _

**Epilogue**

_ I don't even know if I believe _

_ I don't even know if I believe _

_ I don't even know if I believe _

_ Everything you're trying to say to me _

(Believe - Mumford & Sons)

“Can you drive?” Those are the first words Andromache has spoken since they left the cabin and headed for the car, Quynh carrying her bag over her shoulder. Andromache goes to the other car and Quynh tenses, ready to fight, but all she does is pull out a bag from the trunk before closing it once more. She looks up at Quynh and smirks, bloody and fierce and beautiful in a way that Quynh will always feel makes her more than human.

_ She’s mortal.  _ Booker’s words ring in her ears. That changes things; Quynh needs to recalculate—and quick. She curses Booker silently for keeping this from her; for risking  _ everything  _ by not telling her sooner.

That even now she doesn’t know if  _ everything  _ is Quynh’s revenge or Andromache’s life infuriates her. She feels this as the keenest of betrayals, and it comes from within herself.

How dare her mind heal before she is ready to move on?

“No.”

Andromache nods. “Okay. I’ll drive. You tell me where to go.”

It’s a risk. Quynh hesitates. They could walk, but the others will wake soon. They simply don’t have  _ time. _

“Get in the car,” Andromache tells her, but the words are gentle in a way that has always been reserved for their family, Quynh most of all.

Quynh finds herself moving to comply before she even decides that she will.

She shoves her bag into the back seat and settles in the passenger side. Andromache buckles herself into the front seat and turns on the car. “Which way?”

Quynh guides her away from the cabin from memory as she pulls up directions to the nearest highway. She does not care where they go; she did not plan for this turn of events. She’s cunning though; she’ll figure something out before long.

She freezes when Andromache speaks again. “Quynh.”

Quynh waits, but nothing else is forthcoming. She realizes that Andromache is offering her a chance to refuse to listen to anything more. After a brief internal struggle, she prompts, “Yes?”

Curiosity will ever be her downfall, it seems.

“I am not going to run. Not from you. Not anymore.”

Quynh laughs, a bright sound, because she does not believe that at all.

“I mean it.” Andromache’s tone is sincere, but her tone has always been sincere. That is what made the breach of trust turn so acrid inside of Quynh’s veins, corroding all of her goodness from the inside out. “You can hurt me. As much as you want, in any way you like. But only death or capture can keep me from your side.”

“Those are pretty words.”

Andromache’s jaw clenches, but she nods. “I’ll prove them to you in time. But I want to say them now, so that you know what I’m proving each moment I choose not to fight back.”

“You think you love me,” Quynh realizes. “Still.”

“I will always love you.”

_ Pretty words,  _ Quynh thinks again. “You will never make me believe that.”

“I will die trying to correct my mistakes.” Andromache’s grip on the wheel is loose, her jaw relaxed once more. “But I hope that you give me enough time to make the effort count.”

Quynh smiles, unbidden, at the thought. It is far from nice, far from friendly. “We’ll see.”

Those are the last words spoken between them as they drive away from the rising sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap! thank you for reading, whether you waited until it was complete or have been following along. I appreciate every kind comment and kudos that has gotten us to this point, and I'd really love to know what you liked if you made it to this point! Feel free to comment on things you'd like to see brought up in the continuing fic; I make no promises, but I'm flexible! 
> 
> And, again, endless thanks to my beta and friend Sam, who not only poked me until I wrote this, but cheerlead and extensively betaed this piece. I love you my guy.

**Author's Note:**

> Translations (French): 
> 
> Je pensais que tu étais mort! = I thought you were dead!
> 
> Oú sommes-nous? = Where are we?


End file.
